I have a (closed source, proprietary, external) program with a tendency to stop working (not die - just quit doing things, likely due to network latency).

I want to write a short perl program that checks to make sure the program hasn't stopped. Since it writes to a several times a second (when working), I thought I could check the time of the file every second (with "sleep 1"), and if it differed from the current time by more than a second, kill the program and restart it.

Does the idea sound reasonable or does someone know a completely different (better) approach? I assume I would use "exec" (and not "system") to start the program. Does some easy way exist to get the process number to kill it? Any other pitfalls to avoid?

In reply to Keeping a program running by Anonymous Monk

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