Thanks for your reply. The thing is, I don't want to watch the long running process - I just want to initiate it and then forget about it. So I guess I just want a way to background a process without relying on *nix's &
This is hard to do portably and reliably with the same code. You may want to alternatively fork & exec (on Unix) or use Win32::Process or Win32::Job on Windows, based on the value of $^O.
-xdg
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