Is there a good process control module on CPAN?

[Jim Cochrane]

I'm looking for a good, stable module for controlling processes - execing,
waiting, etc. It also needs to be portable - that is, work well on at
least UNIX/Linux and Windows. It looks like:

Proc::Background

is a candidate, but it has no rating on CPAN. Does anyone know if this is
a reasonably reliable module? Are there other modules that I should look
at for this?

Sidetrack - Does anyone else find the search.cpan.org search facility
inadequate? One major complaint I have is that it appears to do
an OR search by default if multiple words are entered in the search
string, although using AND in the string appears to force an and search.
There also appears to be no way to search for a literal word - for example,
I searched for

unix AND windows

and got hits for modules for which 'window' appeared, but not 'windows'.
Could I be missing something or using it wrong?

Thanks!