Wowzers. I hadn't seen that before and finding the documentation for it took Google's help: perlport.

As an optimization, may not call the command shell specified in $ENV{PERL5SHELL}. system(1, @args) spawns an external process and immediately returns its process designator, without waiting for it to terminate. Return value may be used subsequently in wait or waitpid. Failure to spawn() a subprocess is indicated by setting $? to "255 << 8". $? is set in a way compatible with Unix (i.e. the exitstatus of the subprocess is obtained by "$?>> 8", as described in the documentation). (Win32)

In reply to Re^2: Background process by Your Mother
in thread Background process by tart

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