note pc88mxer You're executing <c>command</c> in the background, so the pid you are getting back is the pid of the shell that's spawning <c>command</c> and not of <c>command</c> itself. Just want to make sure you're aware of that. <p>If you just want to launch <c>command</c> and not worry about it, just use <c>fork</c> and <c>exec</c> directly: <P><c> my $pid = fork(); die "unable to fork: $!" unless defined($pid); if (!$pid) { # child exec('command...'); die "unable to exec: $!"; } # parent continues here, pid of child is in $pid </c> <p>In the exec, perhaps you'll want to redirect the child's output to either /dev/null or a file. <p>Another option is to 'daemonize' the child which involves detaching it from the parent's process group. For an example, have a look at <A HREF="http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/359">http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/359</a>, and I'm sure there's code on CPAN to do it, too. <p>In your original code, I think you were getting broken pipes because you were closing <c>$handle</c> and the child was still writing to its STDOUT. 671047 671047