For the newbies, I should have posted this years ago....

Here is the standard (tiny) "bread and butter" perl script (on Linux) I use in my crontab files to insure key processes are alive ( just in case ! ) like httpd, named, sshd, etc.

The example below if for named......

#!/usr/bin/perl

open(PS,"/bin/ps x|") || die "Can't Open PS";
while(<PS>) {
if (/usr\/sbin\/named/) { close PS; exit;}
}
close PS;
system("/usr/sbin/named");