t0mas gave you %95 of what you need. Use
system to do the calls you need, just add the
&
at the end of the system call
and your perl program won't wait for them to
complete before proceeding. If you use
exec control
will never return to your perl program.
Alternatively, you
could do something with fork in your perl program,
but that would be uglier and not really add any benefit.
system "mhmail someone@somewhere.com -body $meg &";
system "get_mail &";