in reply to working with pid's

you may use rather pidfiles and read them or do ps lookups as shown below
note: this code was not hardly tested:
my %name2pid; @qpids = `ps -aux | grep q3ded`; foreach $qpid (@qpids){ ($pid, $name)=(split /\s/, $qpid)[0,-1] $name=~s/^(.*)\..*/$1/; $name2pid{$name}=$pid;
now %name2pid contains pairs "servername<->pid" and you can manupulate them
i.e. $name2pid{'ctf'} gives you ctf server's pid number.

/Maqs.