note Linuxboy Here are a few additional related details:<p> <p> My pid is in $$ or is returned by getpgrp(0)<p> My parent's pid is getppid()<p> <p> Launching a process and *not* waiting is done with fork but read the fork docs before using it because it doesn't work like you might expect... Using open instead of fork is probably a better choice much of the time.<p> <p> Closing the opened handle without reading the output dumps the output to stdout. (this could be implementation specific??)<p> <p> You can get the exit code of the child process from $? >>8<p> <p> Linuxboy<p> 1698 1698