I have used Proc::Background a few times and it is much more readable than fork and exec. Plus, it works on Windows too -- fork tends not to work well there.

use Proc::Background;
my $proc;
my @commands=($cmd1,$cmd2);
foreach my $foo (@commands) {
   $proc =  Proc::Background->new($foo);
}
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(I have updated the code above to remove the wait call, note: Proc::Background has some very good features if you want to wait on a process or check whether processes are still running...those features are not required here)