HI i have read alot of posts on how to get a PID of a child script etc. My problem is that i have to test incoming connections on a machine. So i decided to write a script that listens on a particular port and then the calling script tries to SSH into a remote machine and runs a nmap query to find out if the port is reachable. Since the calling script has SSH and run the nmap query i can't use  exec. I just want to know if i can call a script and find out its PID so that once all tests are done i can kill the running scripts ? Hope it makes sense.

Update

thanks zentara...this is exactly what i wanted :) your monks are awsome. So now i have a thread.pl that simply binds to local port and waits to accept connection. My calling script creates a thread.pl for every port that i need to test. I then SSH into a remote host and run nmap against current host. once i get the output i kill all running threads.

#!/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

use Proc::Background;
use Net::OpenSSH;



    my @ports = ("443","8080");
    my @threads = '';
    my $index = 0;
    foreach my $port(@ports){

        $threads[$index] = Proc::Background->new("/usr/bin/perl thread
+.pl $port");    
        $index++;
    }


    my $ssh = Net::OpenSSH->new("remote.host.net", user=>"me",passwd=>
+"******");
    $ssh->error and die "Can't ssh to host\n";

    my @output = $ssh->capture("nmap -p T:8080,443 my.host.name");

    print @output;

    foreach my $thread (@threads){
        print "Killing $thread\n";
        $thread->die;
    }
    print "Done ";
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