Perl: tail file in background while running another system command in loop

Question

I'm trying to write a Perl script to capture system log output while a loop runs a system command at intervals. I want the script to do the equivalent of something I often do on the (unix) command line: taking Java process thread dumps by tailing /var/log/jbossas/default/console.log into a new file in the background, while running kill -QUIT [PID] an arbitrary number of times at intervals, in the foreground. I do not need to examine or process the log file output while it's being tailed, I just want it to go to a new file while my loop runs; once the loop exits, the background task should exit too.

# basic loop
# $process is PID given as argument 
my $duration = 6;
my $dumps = 0;
until ($dumps == $duration) {
      system "kill -QUIT $process";
      $dumps++;
      print STDOUT "$dumps of $duration thread dumps sent to log.\n";
      print STDOUT "sleeping for $frequency seconds\n";
      sleep 30;
}

Somehow I need to wrap this loop in another loop that will know when this one exits, and then exit the background log tailing task. I realize that this should be trivial in Perl, but I am not sure of how to proceed, and other questions or examples I've found are not doing quite what I'm trying to do here. Seems like using Perl's system blocks my proceeding into the inner loop; exec forks off the tail job so I'm not sure how I'd exit it after my inner loop runs. I'd strongly prefer to use only core Perl modules, and not File::Tail or any additional CPAN modules.
Thanks in advance for any feedback, and feel free to mock my Perlessness. I've looked for similar questions answered here, but if I've missed one that seems to address my problem, I'd appreciate your linking me to it.

Answer 1

This is probably best suited with an event loop. Read up on the answer to Making a Perl daemon that runs 24/7 and reads from named pipes , that'll give you an intro on reading a filehandle in an event loop. Just open a pipe to the tail output, print it off to the file, run the kill on a timer event, then once the timer events are done just signal an exit.