Glad you figured it out!

Here's another idea - just something to think about. On my system (Red Hat Linux 9) there's an 'nscd' start/stop/status script in /etc/rc.d/init.d. So at a command prompt I can do

   service nscd status
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and if the nscd daemon is running, the return code will be zero(0) - if it's not running, the return code will be some positive number. So, you could do something like this:

   #!/usr/bin/perl -w
   @args = ("/sbin/service", "nscd", "status");
   while (system(@args) == 0) {
      print "job still running!\n";
      sleep 2;
   }
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HTH.