Hi Monks, I've got a Perl script, lets call it job.pl, running in response to an HTTP request running under Apache. The script has 2 jobs to do:
1) respond to the user,
2) a potentially much longer job

I want to run the longer job in the background, so the browser user doesn't get bored and can also close his browser. I've tried backticks and system to initiate the longer job e.g. as follows


job.pl contains......

`path\longerjob.pl &`;
print "response to user";
exit;

[download]
but the whole response waits for longerjob to complete. Perhaps this is really a Unix question but "path\longerjob.pl &" works fine on the Unix command line. Why does the perl script wait for it to complete ? Can I stop Perl waiting ? I haven't tried fork yet is that an answer ? the only answer ?
Thanks.

In reply to A background job from a browser by u671296

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