When you give a list to exec, it treats all of the function arguments as program arguments. Instead, pass it a string: 
perl -e 'exec("nohup sleep 10 &")'

[download]
behaves how you'd expect.

See 370911 for some more Perlish approaches.

In reply to Re: Starting a process and dying... by sgifford
in thread Starting a process and dying... by GaijinPunch

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