If you only have a few and you're on a *nix-type system, you can do the nifty /dev/tty trick, and have them redirect their status output to a certain terminal (call them in the cron job with foo.pl > /dev/tty9 or whatever makes sense. If you have a bunch, this can still work if you prepend the process' name to the message, e.g.

print "$0:(", scalar localtime, ") : $message\n";
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Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor