in reply to How to get more than 80 characters out of PS

Well this is a Unix question instead of a Perl question. But depending on your flavor of Unix, you may be able to do something like my $ps_check = `ps -efww | grep $pid.log`;

From the manpage for ps on my system (OS X 10.4.1):

-w Use 132 columns to display information, instead of the default which is your window size. If the -w option is specified more than once, ps will use as many columns as necessary without regard for your window size.