Hi Guys,

Thanks for the info. To give a bit more information, I need to be able to control another daemon that operates very much like a webserver - it needs to be largely independent and needs to be persistent beyond the life of the perl script. As it's persistent, I'm fairly obviously not looking for a return value. Exec "never returns", system waits for a return value, hanging my apache, as does backticks and qx. Occasionally I even read the manuals :) Admittedly, I have not tried leaving some form of "hanging pipe", but that didn't appear to gaurantee persistence beyond the life of the script.

As for the security of the CGI script, I'm aware of taint checking and the requirements to move any user inputs away from the shell. The current problem with *that* is the deployment system is not yet fully defined (joy!). But the system security is not a *huge* issue, as the user never sees the commands being executed at the shell, and cannot enter anything anyway (not at the moment at least - when I do file uploads, the story will change).

Again, many thanks for the replies!
Mike.

PS, Got an account now :)