Note that the originaly poster appears to be using a Microsoft "operating system" which means that fork probably isn't the best choice. This is because prior to Perl 5.6.0, fork() didn't work. With Perl 5.6.0, fork() might work for this but it is very new and appears to be quite buggy in some situations.

Personally I'd use system(1,"script") to prevent the calling script from waiting.