The reason I listed the response dated Aug 23, 2003 at 04:40 is that the Master.pl runs very fast. One of the calls in in a loop so this will call several instances of Slave.pl which quieries outside databases and has a long delay. I do not want to hold up Master.pl waiting on Slave.pl, I just want things to go. In my second need for this, Master2.pl calls and sends data to three different concurrent processes. Master does not need to know the success or failure of the processes, that is taken care of by a seperate process.