I am trying to write an application that displays data on the screen, or emails the data to the sender, if there is a lot of data to display. For the email part, I fork off a process so that the child does all the data gathering, while the parent merely displays a message, and is supposed to quit.

But it doesnt. The child does his thing, but the stupid parent keeps waiting for the child to finish.

Anyway, here is my code sample: 

# %form is a hash that contains all the values
# that the person entered on the form.  It is global

# IF THE USER SELECTED EMAIL..DO THIS CODE
if ($form{attachme} eq "yes")
{
    $query =~ s/(and|or)$//;        # Strip off trailing AND/OR
    my ($values, $pid);

    if ($pid = fork)
    {
        # Send the data by email if option selected

        # The 'Search Was Successful' note has been moved to
        # the correct directory on the hard drive
        # and the script redirects the user to that page.
        # This is to stop HTTPD from hanging.

        # users'printvtml is just like vtml'printvtml, EXCEPT that the
        # Content Type text/html line has been replaced with a Locatio
+n header
        # to redirect the user to the note saying that the email has b
+een sent.

        $form{-nextpage} = "/admin/users/reports/mailview.vtml";

        # This is a function that we use to print to the screen.  
        # It is not causing this problem.
        &users'printvtml($URLPREFIX."$form{-nextpage}",\%form,\%script
+);
        exit (0);


    }
    elsif (defined $pid)
    {
        # CHILD PROCESS GOES HERE
        if ( $form{which} eq "custom" ) { $values = $form{retval}; }
        elsif ( $form{which} eq "all" ) { $values = $form{allval}; }
        exec ("perl $fork_to $form{sendto} \"$query\" $values");
        exit (0);
    }

    exit (0);
}

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Edit by tye

In reply to How do you tell the parent process to stop it's HTTP transfer, when it forks off a child process? by kleinbiker7

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