I have a program that runs for 9 hours and around the 4 hour point I need to run a second program. Now I use system() but I don't want to wait for the child process to finish before continuing with the parent process. I've also tried exec() but the parent process just dies.

I've been searching for about 1/2 hour and haven't found an answer I can understand

I saw that system(1, "prog") on a windows system will work but I can't get it to run in Linux.

These programs are different so I don't see using fork() as something viable.

Am I misusing system( 1, "/program"); or is there another way to do this? perldoc on my system didn't come up with anything about the "1" option that I saw mentioned with Windows systems.

Update: I just realized that using system("/program &") runs the program in the background and doesn't make the parent program wait for the child to finish.

In reply to Asynchronous Program Spawning by awohld

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