If something works for you, it's very Perlish to incorporate that in your Perl program. Perl is, after all, a very succesfull glue language.

my $pid = `ps ax | awk '/programname/ && !/awk/ {print \$1}`; # ;-)
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Or you could do:

open my $ps => "ps ax |" or die;
my $pid;
while (<$ps>) {
    if (/^\s*(\d+).*\bprogramname\b/) {
        $pid = $1;
        last;
    }
}
close $ps or die;
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If you happen to run Solaris, you could make use of psgrep instead of ps.

Abigail