Shucks. Looks like your on a windows system. If you were using unix, you could just include a "&" at the end of the command line that you pass to system(), and the shell invoked by system() to run the command would do the fork/exec for you.

(Maybe if you have a windows port of the bash shell, you'd have the same functionality regarding "background job control" as you get on unix -- I'm not a windows user these days, so I'm not sure about that.)

OTOH, doing the fork/exec yourself with perl functions will give you a lot more control over the situation, and you'll probably want that.