I realize you were probably doing a quick port, but there are a few things I would like to point out.

• You create an explicit variable with your for loop, but never use it.
• There is a minor syntax error (for my $i in should just be for my $i).
• You pass -9 to kill, but this should probably be 9 (the negative signal has a different meaning than it does to the shell command kill).

Fixing these, I would probably write it as follows:

my $child = fork;
if ($child) {
  # I am in the parent...wait then kill
  for (1..10) {
    sleep 1;
    print ".";
  }
  kill 9, $child;
}
else {
  # Run the background program
  exec '/path/to/program > /dev/null 2>&1';
}
[download]

Update: an alternative method that avoids explicit forking, and perhaps looks a bit more Perlish:

my $pid = open my $cmdfh, "-|", '/path/to/program'
    or die "Cannot fork: $!\n";

for ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    print ".";
    sleep 1;
}

kill 9, $pid;
[download]