Could someone point me up the equivelant in perl?

I reckon this amounts to, what's the process for translating forking from bash to perl.

#!/bin/bash
konqueror http://www.google.com &
pid=$!

# give the page some time to load
sleep 5
kill $pid
[download]

By the way, this isn't an academic question -- I'm using this simple script to verify various html downloads by checking the konqueror html cache for text strings I'm interested in, for pages that can't be easily downloaded with wget/web mechanize because of javascript and redirect nastiness.

Also, for those interested in shell-equivelance strategies, I posted essentially the same question to haskell-cafe.