Monks,

I wrote a script on everyone's favorite OS (sarcasm anyone?), Win XP, and I can get it to execute an external program, but it just hangs from there. If I exit the program that I'm trying to run, the script continues. Also, if I run the command simply from dos, it launches fine and brings me right back to the command prompt.

I tried using "exec" instead of "system" an although it executes the command, it quits my perl script.

Is there a way to spawn a new process to run this command or does Windows have an equivalent to Unix's '&' option to run a command in the background? Here is the portion of code that executes the program: 
 my $bi = 'C:\Program Files\program.exe';

 if ($ans =~ /\bn\b/i){
   print "\n### Now starting program.exe\n\n";
   system ($bi) and print "Could not execute $bi: $!\n";
   stop_services();
 }

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In reply to MS Forking Blues by Dru

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