I'd like to be able to start a perl script that takes up to 20 minutes to run from a web page. The user will click a button, which will run a cgi script that starts the perl script in the background.

It was asked very recently: once in the referenced node, and ISTR at least yet another time yesterday or the day before - but I can't seem to find where. The usual article by merlyn should have been mentioned there too.

Update: found!