Instead of doing system(), you could do "fork()" and have the child do "exec()". The parent process will continue to do whatever it's doing, because "fork()" returns immediately.

See perlipc for details, and the perlfunc section on fork for a brief description. A simple example: 

my $child_pid = fork();
if ( ! defined( $child_pid )) {
    warn "fork failed\n";
}
elsif ( $child_pid == 0 ) { # true for the child process
    exec( $cmd, @args );
}
# the parent gets here when the fork succeeds...

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In reply to Re: launching external program with SYSTEM causes script to hang until program closed by graff
in thread launching external program with SYSTEM causes script to hang until program closed by d9vx

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