Close STDOUT.

You may also need to close STDERR. When I created a fork()ing script where the child needed to go off and continue working, I also had to close STDERR off. :)

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I know you mentioned that you are using perl/cgi, but if you are running this under mod_perl, then you can use the mod_perl hooks to register a cleanup handler to do your post request processing. This way Apache will close the connection for you , and then afterwards execute your cleanup handler for you.

If you are using the mod_perl Apache::Registry module to run your cgi/perl script, then you could add something like this to your code:

  my $r = Apache->request();
  my $sub = sub {
    # Do your post request processing here
  };

  $r->register_cleanup($sub);
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Of course, your code will be dependant on mod_perl at this point and it won't run as a plain old CGI anymore, but I thought it was worth noting as an option.

Second, it's not the CGI program that talks to the browser. A CGI program communicates with the server. So, you have to signal to the server you are ready sending output, and then the server can go on its merry way. Some servers will not send anything to the browser before they have collected all the output from the program - if only they want to sent a Content-length header. Signalling can often be done by closing stdout and stderr.

Third, nowadays browsers and servers don't close the connection automatically right after sending the content of a single request - this is called the keepalive feature.

Abigail

You don't need to if you: close STDOUT will do this automatically for you.

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
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