Yes. Many ways, but the simplest, cleanest and most reliable is: system 1, $cmd, @args;.

Apparently this is documented in http://perldoc.perl.org/perlport.html; but all you really need to know is that it works the same as system without 1 as a first arg, except:

1. It doesn't wait for the command to complete.
2. It returns the pid of the process that is started.

If you're wanting to spawn a process and continue on without waiting plus collect data from the spawned process later, you could use threads. To do that, just start a thread that does the background process and your main code will continue on without waiting. And then you can join the thread(s) later to collect their return data.

However, if you're just wanting to spawn a process and are never concerned about ever checking on it, BrowserUk provided one method for doing so. I was not aware of that method, but I have successfully leveraged the start command available from the command prompt environment. It basically starts a new command prompt to run the desired command and then immediately returns. You can open a command prompt and type start /? to get details about the options for the start command.

The following seems to work for me... the test.bat script simply contains echo "inside batch script":

Update: added wait() call and associated output. Note that without wait(), child procs could become zombies. The call to wait() can be at the very bottom of the script, inside of a parent block.

use warnings;
use strict;

my $pid = fork();

if ($pid){
    print "parent...\n";
}
else {
    sleep 2;
    system "test.bat";
}

if ($pid){
    print "parent: doing stuff...\n";
}
else {
    print "child: exiting\n";
}

if ($pid){
    print "parent: done doing stuff, waiting...\n";
    wait;
    print "parent: children dead, safe to exit\n";
}
[download]

Output:

parent: doing stuff
parent: done doing stuff, waiting...

"inside batch script"
child: exiting
parent: children dead, safe to exit
[download]

Using fork emulation on windows is just asking for trouble.

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