You know, that has worked for me in the past, but not in this case, I have tried system() exec() and fpassthru(), and now recently pcntl_fork(). This perl scripts gets angry when php leaves it alone for some stupid reason. Another thing I am thinking might work for these situations, is to have the first script write a cron job to do the second script, and then the second script will always remove itself from any cron entries, but I am hoping for a simpler solution, if Perl can fork, or whatever.