in reply to parent not waiting for child process

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.
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