System calls and process termination

[idata]

I am starting a perl script that runs forever listening to a port. It is invoked as such:

system("perl home/root/portlistener.pl 100 &");

But now, I have a new requirement to implement a button that is supposed to "close" the port and free up resources. So, when the user taps the button on the resistive touch display, I should kill the perl process. But, how do I kill the perl process when I don't have the PID?

I know you can do something like the script below to echo the PID:

perl home/root/portlistener.pl 100 & echo$!

Or I could run something like:

ps | grep portlistener

But how do I retrieve the PID real-time from within my Arduino code?

Once I retrieve the PID, I can issue a

system("kill xxx");

to kill the process.

Or is there a much better way?

Thanks.

[idata · Accepted solution]

Solved via a call to another PERL script that uses the same port number (shown as 100 in the example above).

perl home/root/stoplistener.pl 100

Inspiration for stoplistener.pl can be found http://forums.devshed.com/perl-programming-6/process-list-script-perl-linux-872135.html here and http://http//stackoverflow.com/questions/3129238/how-do-i-stop-a-process-running-using-perl here.

Ultimately relied on this command to list out the PIDs:

ps | grep "portlistener 100"

Regards,

Gavin