Thanks, to everyone who answered. I am still not sure what I am going to do. For now I am using this code below. However, I am going to try to do as davidrw suggested, as this seems the simplest. I suppose I will have to be calling net start from within the script using backticks or system or something, but that doesn't seem like it should be a problem. 
use strict;
use warnings;
use IPC::Open3;
#my $result = system("C:\\Programme\\Tor\\tor.exe &");
#print "sleeping";
#sleep(3);

my ($WR1, $RD1, $ER1);

my $tor_fhs = {};
my $pid = start_tor($tor_fhs);
sleep 1;
stop_tor($tor_fhs);

sub start_tor {
    my $tor_fhs = shift;
    open3( $tor_fhs->{wr}, $tor_fhs->{rd}, $tor_fhs->{err}, "C:\\Progr
+amme\\Tor\\tor.exe" );
    print "tor started\n";
    return $pid;
}

sub stop_tor {

    my $tor_fhs = shift;
    close($tor_fhs->{wr});
    local($/) = undef;
    close($tor_fhs->{rd});
    #close($ER1);
    print "tor stopped\n";  
}

[download]
UPDATE: Ack, no, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. This starts the service, but doesn't stop it, so after a bit of playing around I had a bunch of processes that I had to stop using ctrl-alt-delete. Maybe time to stop monkeying with things I don't really understand and get this working using net start and net stop.

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

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