Re: Doing a system command and getting the pid

It'd be nice if you gave us what you had tried. It really does help. Anyway ... Off the top of my head, untested:

FORK:
{
 if (my $child = fork())
 {
   print "Child process ID: $child\n";
 }
 elsif (not defined $child)
 {
   # failed to fork.
   next FORK;
 }
 else
 {
   # child.
   open(STDOUT, '>somefile);
   close(STDIN); # just good practice for background procs
   exec($program, @program_args);
 }
}
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Update: Fixed the off-by-everything error as noted by Eimi Metamorphoumai - thanks!

Comment on Re: Doing a system command and getting the pid Download Code

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Re^2: Doing a system command and getting the pid by Eimi Metamorphoumai (Deacon) on Jan 21, 2005 at 00:41 UTC
I think you've got your `if` backwards. `fork` returns zero to the child, and gives the parent the child's pid, so you want to do your `exec` in the case that `$child` is 0 (but defined).	[reply] [d/l] [select]