Has the java process been launched from the Perl script or externally? Because you can not wait using waitpid for a process that is not your child.

If it is an external process, your best option will probably be to use some lock over a file that is also locked by the Java process (or a wrapper) while it runs.

Alternatively, you can check if it is alive looking on the process table (see Proc::ProccessTable for instance) or if it runs as the same user as the Perl script with kill 0, $pid (see kill).