I'm not familiar with cdrecord, but assuming it prints stuff to standard output while it is progressing, you could pipe its output into perl like this:

print "invoking cdrecord...\n";
open CD, "cdrecord |" or die "Couldn't run cdrecord";
while(<CD>) {
    # check $_ for whatever output you're looking for
    # or just print $_;
}
close CD;
print "cdrecord finished\n";
[download]

I hope that's useful. If you can supply a bit more info about how cdrecord outputs its progress, that may help get a more precise answer.