Can somebody point me in the right direction and / or contribute an idea for
this?
Have a look at the man page for the 'killall' command. In short, it signals processes by name, so you don't need to know the PID. You can use system() to run it from Perl, like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings; use strict;
system 'killall -KILL pppd';
sherm--
