Even though I am creating a background job, it is not doing its job (updating the DB with values from a Web service call). Can you advise on how can I make this foreground job (perl program that calls the java program) wait till the background job (to do the java job) completes? Sample code is like this require Proc::Background; my $cmd = "java -jar .....; my $proc1 = Proc::Background->new($cmd);