fork() on Windows is emulated using threads, so I'm not sure this is the best solution in this situation (as the fork and exec idiom will not work).

One way to start a process asynchronously is to use system() with an initial argument of 1: 

    if ($^O eq "MSWin32") {
        system(1, "cmd_to_run arguments");
    }
    else {
        # do fork and exec, or use system("cmd_to_run arguments &");
    }

[download]
The system(1, ...) call works at least on OS/2 too, and is "documented" in perlport.

In reply to Re: Re: spawning Perl scripts by jand
in thread spawning Perl scripts by awkmonk

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