fork+system+exit is wasteful. It creates a process whose entire purpose is to launch another process and wait for it to finish. Let's start by simplifying to fork+exec.

while (1) {
    for my $runCommand (@runArray) {
        $forkMgr->start($runCommand)
            and next;

        exec("/usr/localcw/opt/patrol/nagios/libexec/$runCommand")
            or die("exec: $!");
    }

    $forkMgr->wait_all_children;

    sleep 10;
}
[download]

Now, on to your problem. Your proposed solution of letting hung workers stay hung doesn't make much sense. You'll eventually end up with three hung workers. You gotta kill them if they become hung. Unless you have a better condition based on knowledge of the test programs, a process can be considered hung if it has been running more than some configured amount of time.

Since we can execute code in the process that will execute the test program, all we need to do is call alarm from that process.

use constant TIMEOUT => 60;

while (1) {
    for my $runCommand (@runArray) {
        $forkMgr->start($runCommand)
            and next;

        alarm(TIMEOUT);
        exec("/usr/localcw/opt/patrol/nagios/libexec/$runCommand")
            or die("exec: $!");
    }

    $forkMgr->wait_all_children;

    sleep 10;
}
[download]

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