I don't do wintendo, so I can't answer as to how to find your parent's pid there. But if you've got the pid available you should be able to do kill 0 => $ppid to check. If that returns true then the process is still running. According to perldoc perlport this construct should work on wintendo.

In reply to Process still alive by Fletch
in thread getting a child's process ID by Seshouan

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