Of course if you want to invent the wheel again go ahead, but you got an excellent tool in the daemontools package by D. J. Bernstein that do just that, namely supervise. I use it myself on qmail and my halflife server ;o) If you want do do this in perl you may try something like this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
open(PH, "ps -A|");
while (<PH>) {
    if (/q3ded/) {
        /\b(\d+)\b/;
        $pid = $1;
    }
}
print $pid;

[download]
It will at least return the pid, and you can do whatever you like with it.

In reply to RE: working with pid's by moen
in thread working with pid's by djw

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.