Blasphemy time ... why not just write a shell command instead of a Perl script for this? For example, here is what i use to restart our mod_perl enable web server for Krang: 

/usr/local/krang/bin/krang_ctl stop
sleep 2
/usr/local/krang/bin/krang_ctl start

[download]
Use the right tool for the right job. :)

UPDATE: oh uh ... i see now that i got your order backwards ... start, wait, then stop. I'd still be tempted to solve this with a shell script rather than Perl, because you are dealing mostly with shell commands. One naive solution would be to grep for the process, but i'm sure there is a better way to capture the PID and stop it. Perhaps if you wrote some wrapper script like the apachectl script that keeps track of its PID. It writes the PID to a file and reads that file when you need to stop it. You could write the wrapper in Perl and have it accept two args: start and stop -- then use a shell script to call the Perl script.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

In reply to Re: Start a service, wait 10 seconds, and stop the service. by jeffa
in thread Start a service, wait 10 seconds, and stop the service. by tphyahoo

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.