Update for OpenOffice 2.0 (Beta), incorporating some of the suggestions from the thread. The "-quickstart" flag is no longer there, but using the two flags "-nodefault -nologo", you can get the same results. Hopefully this is useful to someone.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

while (1) {

  if (not grep {/soffice\.bin/} `ps ax`) {
    sleep 5;
    # give the process time to end...
    system("/usr/lib/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice.bin -nodefault 
+-nologo"); 
  }
}
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