Looking to avoid the fork indicates you don’t quite have a handle on Unix process design. It is impossible to start another process on Unix without first forking a program; the child process then calls exec to become the other program of your choice. there is no equivalent to Win32 CreateProcess (though you could use inter-process communication to ask some other daemon to fork/exec for you)

What it sounds like you actually want to avoid is the call to “wait” that blocks the parent process until the child has ended. The module IPC::Run is a good way to run asynchronous processes and capture their output.

In reply to Re^3: Cheapest way for multiple external commands by NERDVANA
in thread Cheapest way for multiple external commands by pedrete

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