The current process id is stored in $$, but I suspect that what you're trying to do is find out when the background process has died, right? If so, you'd be better off using fork(), exec() and waitpid.

A quick search produced a helpfull node that could help: ForkMe

In reply to Re: Getting the pid of the process launched by my perl program by ozone
in thread Getting the pid of the process launched by my perl program by Anonymous Monk

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