Something like this should work (this is an abbreviated version of my service control class).

Warning, this might/will need some fiddling from you. I pulled this out of my (DarkPAN) repo and removed much of the code to make the (for your problem) relevant parts a bit easier to understand.

First, you need to use some Win32 modules:

use Win32::Process;
use Win32;
[download]

We'll use a hash reference to store the app's config and runtime data (could also be another module...).

sub start_app {
    my ($self, $app) = @_;

    my $ProcessObj;
    if(!Win32::Process::Create($ProcessObj,
                               $app->{app},
                               $app->{app}." ".$app->{cmdlineopts},
                                0,
                                NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS,
                                $self->{basePath})) {
        print "Error starting app " . $app->{description} . ": " .
                Win32::FormatMessage( Win32::GetLastError() ) .
                "\n";
        $app->{handle} = undef;
        return 0;
    } else {
        $app->{handle} = $ProcessObj;
        my $app_pid = $app->{handle}->GetProcessID();
        print "Started app " . $app->{description} . " with PID " . $a
+pp_pid . "\n";
        return 1;
   }
}
[download]

You may also want to restart the external application if it quits, so you do something like this every few seconds:

sub check_app {
    my ($self, $app) = @_;

    # Ignore if this application was never started
    # or was intentionally stopped
    if(!defined($app->{handle})) {
        return $self->start_app($app);
    }

    # First, check if the process exited
    if($app->{handle}->Wait(1)) {
        # Process exited, so, restart
        print "Process exit detected: " . $app->{description} . "!n";
        return $self->start_app($app);
    }

    # All ok, just return true
    return 1;
}
[download]

Ok, you might also want to intentionally kill an external app, either because it hangs or you just don't like its color:

sub stop_app {
    my ($self, $app) = @_;

    if(defined($app->{handle}) && $app->{handle}) {
        print "Killing app " . $app->{description} . "...\n";
        my $app_pid = $app->{handle}->GetProcessID();
        $app->{handle}->Kill(0);
        $app->{handle}->Wait(2000);
        $app->{handle} = undef;
        print "...killed.\n";
    } else {
        print "App " . $app->{description} . " already killed\n";
    }

}
[download]

I hope the code is useable for you.

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