I am trying to use fork to run a process in the background while the parent process continues running its own code. What I have is:

Neils Program:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# some code
if ($pid = fork )
{
print "this is the parent\n";
}
else
{
print "this is the child\n";
exec `some unix command that does not terminate`;
}
# more of Neils code
exit;

[download]

It is my goal to run neil's program, kick off the unix command in background mode then continue running more of Neil's code. When I run this program and do a ps -ef on my solaris 9 machine I get:

What I want to happen is if I do a ps -ef, then I should get one copy of Neil's main program and one copy of Neil's child process. Furthermore, if I kill Neil's Main program, the child should die. I have tried the examples of fork in the Perl Cookbook with similar results.

Finally, the reason that I do not use a pipe to an open statement is that using this process prevents my child process from communicating to its license server. So I am trying a different approach using fork.

thanks for any suggestions

W3NTP
neil

In reply to how to run a process in background mode by w3ntp

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