To avoid the forking stuff, you could just call another script via system like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

system('start perl -e "sleep 5; print qq(\007)"');
print "Before the beep ...\n";
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The important part here is the "start" thing. It starts your process and then returns to the shell spawning it immediately. Now you just have to wait a sensible amount of time (the "sleep" part above), and the do the sendkeys stuff (the "print" part above), and it should work, if the period to sleep is stable.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com