Thanks,

Unfortunately that doesn't work. As soon as the main program (the one that did the forking) finishes running, the child process (the one that got forked) gets reaped.

I even tried modifying that code slightly to incorporate the previous suggestion of using Proc::Daemon::init. It doesn't matter, the child still dies. Is it possible that this is simply something that can only be done in sh and not in Perl?

Here is my test code (based on your suggestion):
a.pl :

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
      my $pid = fork();
      if ($pid == 0)
      {
              # This is the child process.
              # exec() the external program.
              exec("./b.pl &")
                  or die "could not exec my_program: $!";
      }
      elsif (!defined($pid))
      {
              die "could not fork";
      }

      # Everything below here is the parent process
      print "This is the parent process\n";
[download]

b.pl:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use Proc::Daemon;
Proc::Daemon::init;

open ( OUT, ">b.out" );
while ( 1 ) {
    print OUT `/bin/date`;
    sleep( 2 );
}
[download]

I found that a.pl is calling b.pl, which is outputing the present time to b.out. But then, a.pl exits out, and so does b.pl. This is not the desired result. By the way, I'm doing this on FreeBSD 4.1.1 if that makes any difference.