From what I've seen and heard, running this type of thing on Unix is a lot easier than on a Windows platform, then again, you can't always change your code from one OS to another.

Although fork is one way of going, running scripts with the & operator on Unix allows a script to run in the background. You may try to use your backticks but to add the & ad the end to put the script into background mode. If the backticks don't work, try the system() function.

I don't do this a lot, so I may be wrong. I would like to know if you managed to succeed in this.

Remember that some Perl function like fork are reliant on the operating system, and they do function different on different platforms.