Done in that way, there is no difference: exec will start a shell, just as system does.

What the OP wants is:

• fork, then in the child process:
• open the output file and attach it to STDOUT
• exec with the list of parameters (it will not invoke a shell)
• meanwhile, in the parent process, you can wait for the child to finish

For more info, you can look at "perlipc" and the "fork" entry in "perlfunc"

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile

Most of my code is tested...

Perl is strongly typed, it just has very few types (Dan)