Hi Raiden690,

Could you try and paste your code without what I'm guessing is your editor's whitespace markers? (See How do I change/delete my post?)

i would like to get the exact same behaviour that i get with $ret = system( "some command"); but in addition i want to get the pid

When system returns, the external command would normally have finished, so what good will the PID do you? (Windows has the system(1, @args) variant, but I'm guessing you're not on Windows.) Could you explain the bigger picture of what you're trying to accomplish?

In case you're writing some kind of process/daemon that's supposed to go into the background and keep running (and manage a PID file), there are several modules to help you. For example, I've used Daemon::Control a lot recently, although that comes with a lot of extra functions for writing an LSB compatible daemon. There are plenty of alternatives, see for example the recent thread process run in background.

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D