Why all the futzing around with external programs when you can do it with just Perl?

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w

use IO::Socket::INET;

print "syslog is ",  check_syslog( 'localhost' ) ? 'up' : 'down', "\n"
+;

sub check_syslog {
    my $s = IO::Socket::INET->new(
        PeerHost => $_[0],
        Timeout  => 1,
        Proto    => 'udp',
        PeerPort => 514,
    );
    return 0 unless $s;
    close $s;
    return 1;
}
[download]

In other words, just see whether you can connect to the socket that syslogd opens. Much easier than fiddling around with ps, grep, pidfiles and/or procfs.