giuliomoro interestingly enough, I accidentally found a more elegant way of launching the serial2osc utility with SuperCollider. I now launch the script from SClang when the SC patch loads using unixCmd.

~spid = "/root/BelaUtils/serial2osc --port /dev/ttyS5 --baud 115200 --remote localhost:57120".unixCmd({|ec, pid| postln("serial2osc (pid %) exited with code %".format(pid, ec)) }, true);

Magically, when SC crashes or quits.. so does the serial2osc script. :-)