It's worth considering whether you need this degree of control, or whether it would be enough to do something simpler...say, run a job once an hour automatically.

If you need this degree of control and interactivity, I would have a wrapper script which launches your program, storing the process id (PID ) of the process. Then at regular intervals it can verify the process is still running, using ps. When the process stops, the wrapper can send a message.

A simple way to indicate the status is to create an indicator file, and delete it at the end. You can 'touch' the file at intervals to demonstrate the process is running and not crashed. Alternate, using the open with a pipe strategy, you can send text messages at intervals, 'still running', 'crashed' or 'completed'.

You might look at IPC::System::Simple , it makes collecting return values simple. Read the Advanced Synopsis for examples.

Sure, lots of ways. For example instead of calling your program you could call a wrapper script that calls your program and on exit creates a file/appends to a file/touches a file. This can be detected by your script

#!/bin/sh
# wrapper script

program1

touch /tmp/finishedwith$1
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You could call this from perl with a random number as parameter (the $1) so that each finish would create a different file. In the perl script you would monitor for the existance of this file

This is easy but not very clean and safe. Another way is to use fork instead of system, because fork tells you the process id of the newly created process. And you can wait() for the process to finish (which would block your script) or check if the process is still running (somehow ;-).

But really, look at Parallel::ForkManager, all the functions you want are already there. With "run_on_finish" you can choose a subroutine that is called when the process finishes.