By the sounds of it what you want to do is have a server deamon running all the time. Your CGI then interacts with this re-initializing it and doing whatever else as required. There are endless examples of server daemons on this site as we as plenty of modules on CPAN.

A problem with system calls per se and restarting services is permission. If the service is not running as the webuser 'nobody', 'apache', 'www', etc you need to have a suid script which opens a whole new bag of worms. With a custom server you can run it as the web user and avoid the issue entirely.

cheers

tachyon

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