Hackish indeed! Maybe, but I didn't really want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and I want the script to be as quick as possible.

Also I'd like to understand what was going wrong in my original code. I might cave in to the Unix::PID module now, although it does has a few prereqs:

Warning: prerequisite Class::Std 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite Class::Std::Utils 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite List::Cycle 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite Math::Fibonacci::Phi 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite Time::HiRes 0 not found.
Warning: prerequisite version 0 not found.
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