Just a minor pick (which applies to all posted solutions so far) , on unixlike the killing part should be in at least two stages: first send signal of normal termination (SIGTERM) and then signal of immediate termination (SIGKILL) to let the ext. app a chance to clean up. In some cases even stop/cont signals can be appropriate. It is probably better to send signal to the process group id (perl kill with negative signal, or system shell kill with negative pid) or to take care of the external app potential children (or simply imagine you fired a shell...); if the external app has acted "daemonic" then one should have knowledge about the app's behaviour, /proc or a process table walker could be of help.

cheers, --stephan