How to sleep(), or use a while() in the background?

taint has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings, Monks!
I'm attempting to create temporary links (prevent "hot linking"). So what I'm attempting, is to create a symlink on initiation, and set a timer (sleep / while) that when reached, unlinks the symlink. It all works just fine, except, that it sort of "hangs" the script/web page, while the timer is counting down. I first attempted this with the sleep function. But am now trying with a while(). Here's what I have now

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use feature qw(say);
use POSIX qw(strftime);
my $ctime= strftime "%H-%M", localtime;
my $dlfile= "../PATH_TO/SOME_FILE";
my $dlname= "SOMENAME";
my $newname= "./ANOTHER_PATH/$ctime-$dlname";
my $maxtime= 30;
my $args = ('-s');

print "content-type:text/html; charset=utf-8\n\n";

say qq~
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"
+ />
    <title>Download $dlname</title>
</head>
<body
<h1>Download $dlname</h1>
~;
system("/bin/ln $args $dlfile $newname");
while ($maxtime > 0) {
$maxtime--;
sleep(1);
say qq~<a href="$newname">download</a>~;

if ($maxtime == 0) {
unlink $newname;
say qq~<h3>Sorry! $newname no longer exists!</h3>~;
    }
}
say qq~<p>
<br />
</p>
</body></html>
~;

exit
[download]

I'm sure this is really simple. But not for me, today. :/
Thanks, for any pointers!

--Chris

EDIT: fix a couple of typos. Move a block.

Ąλɐp ʇɑəɹ⅁ ɐ əʌɐɥ puɐ ʻꜱdləɥ ꜱᴉɥʇ ədoH

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