Nothing returned from system 'ps' command

Hi there

I'm running perl on Tru64 version 5.1a. In my program I'm trying to find =
out what processes are running on the host machine. To do this I'm =
running the system 'ps' command:=20

@pslines =3D qx/ps -eopid,args/;

Unfortunately this seems to return 0 lines about 90% of the time even =
though there are processes running. Consequently I've had to embed it in =
a loop to execute until it returns a list of the processes. This works =
but is hardly efficient! I'm executing the command from a forked =
process, although I'm not sure if this would make a difference. I've =
also written a small test program containing just the loop described =
above and it works fine, returning the list of processes 100% of the =
time.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening, or maybe there's =
a better way to achieve the same goal?

Thanks in anticipation,

Julian

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