athomason has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
I'm using Net::SSH::Perl (thanks btrott!) in non-interactive mode to start up a daemon on another server. The daemon needs to stay alive after my connection dies, so I've been attempting to start up the process in the background. However, $ssh->cmd( "~/startup.pl &" ) hangs after executing the command. I thought I could trick the system with $ssh->cmd( "sh -c '~/startup.pl &'" ) but that hangs just the same. If the daemon (or any process, e.g. perl -e 'sleep 10') eventually exits on its own, the $ssh->cmd call returns and the programs returns. It seems that the login shell won't return until the process it spawned dies. This seems to generalize to other login shells as well (I tried rsh), but not non-login shells. My last resort would be an alarm to kill the connection, but that's painfully ugly. Does anyone know how to disable or work around this behavior within Net::SSH::Perl?