This is what I have decided to do, but I'll have to do it higher up application, because the system() function that I used is burried into a perl module. And I still need to do a little bit of manipulation after that command has finished, so I must wait until that command returns.

By moving the process forking higher up into the application I should be able to let the parent tell the browser it can go away while having the child parse my data.

Thanks for your help