Windows shells have the start command to launch stuff in a variety of ways. It's a bit of extra overhead because it now requires an extra layer of command interpreter.

For example, start /b turtle.exe will try to launch turtle.exe, and give you a success/fail result code. It will not wait for turtle.exe to finish, so any result code provided by turtle.exe is completely lost. 

my $command = "turtle.exe";
if ($^O =~ /win/i)
   { $command = "start /b $command" }
else
   { $command = "$command &" }
my $ret = system($command);

[download]
However, there's no shell-accessible way of using Win32's WaitForMultipleObjects() API, which is what you'd need to launch A, B and C, and wait for all three to complete.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

In reply to Re: Simultaneous system() calls by halley
in thread Simultaneous system() calls by Sprad

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.