The shell launched by system doesn't seem to wait for the background process to complete, at least not in my tests. If the OS has an setsid shell command, is there any advantage of using fork and exec over just: 
system('setsid sleep 1000 &');

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It seems to work here.

Also, the OP may want to think about what to do with open filehandles. It's possible the effects of having a second copy of STDOUT open by the child process will cause strange behavior (like never seeing EOF on a pipe/socket to that filehandle). Redirecting to /dev/null would solve that: system('setsid sleep 1000 </dev/null >/dev/null 2>/dev/null &');

In reply to Re^2: apache2 and system by sgifford
in thread apache2 and system by water

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