#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

#Benjamin Goldberg 
#The Apache process does NOT wait for the CGI process to exit, it waits 
#for the pipes to be closed.  (Note that if the CGI is a NPH script, then 
#it does waitpid() for the script to exit). 
#Thus, you do not really need a child process -- you can have your CGI 
#process transmute itself into whatever you would have the child process 
#do, by doing something like: 

$| = 1;         # need either this or to explicitly flush stdout, etc. 
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
print "Going to start the fork now\n";
open( STDIN, "</dev/null");
open( STDOUT, ">>/dev/null");
open( STDERR, ">>/path/to/logfile");
fork and exit;
exec "program that would be the child process";


#Apache waits for all children to close the pipes to apache.  It 
#does not wait for them to actually exit -- think ... how in the world 
#could it *possibly* know that those processes were really spawned from 
#the CGI process?  Answer:  It can't.  It can only know that *something* 
#still has an open filedescriptor which points to one of the pipes that 
#apache created to capture the CGI's stdout and stderr.  As long as one 
#of these pipes is open, then apache waits.