Help ** Getting the pid of a background process **

[Groove Salad]

Greetings all,

I am trying to assign the results of a background process to $variable. 
I can't seem to get the correct syntax, could one of you good people 
assist?
Below is a snippet of what I have ( running on Solaris 2.6 ), I know 
there are more elegant ways to do this. I'm open to any suggestions.

I want the results of the ( echo $! ) to be assigned to 
( $save_this_pid ) and returned,  so I can do other processing like 
create a pid file.

$pid = &run_sh_commands("[ -f $logfile ] && mv $logfile $logfile.$time > 
/dev 2>&1",
                                                "echo \"## $0: restarted on `date`\" 
>> $logfile",
                                                 
"$appdir{$os}/$app_name{$port}->{name} 
$app_options >> $logfile 2>&1 &",
                                                 "echo \$!")
                                                 unless ($DEBUG_MODE);
......

sub run_these_sh_commands  {

my @commands = @_;
open(PIPE, "|sh") || die;

        foreach $command (@commands)
        {
                if ( $command =~ /(echo\s\$!)$/
                {
                        $save_this_pid = ( something would go here but I don't know 
what )
                        # otherwise, the pid number gets printed to the screen and 
I want to save it.
                {
                  else
                {
                        print PIPE "$command\n";
                }
                return($save_this_pid);
        }
close(PIPE);
}


Thanks,

gS