I am trying to port a shell script to perl It was: 
/path/to/program/that/would/output/something/and/run/forever > /dev/nu
+ll 2>&1 &
for i in `seq 1 10`; do
    sleep 1;
    echo -n "."
done
kill -9 $!

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The idea is to let the program capture some data and parse its logfile afterwards. So I need to start the program, put it in the background, output something to show I am alive, and kill the programm. However, I couldn't find how to do it.

In reply to Executing a program, displaying some status, and killing it by Spida

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