I'm not sure in what context you're doing this, so this might not be the answer you're after, but you can use fork() to start an external process and have Perl continue without waiting for that process to finish and return.

Update:To answer your second question which I didn't spot the first time around, your current shell should be set in the environment variable $ENV{SHELL}

Update 2:Brain not working today, backticks *doesn't* fork into the background. God knows why I though it did! Thank you fishbot_v2 for reminding me :)

In reply to Re: Change shell within Perl by puploki
in thread Change shell within Perl by Ace128

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