http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1055622


in reply to Re: How do you get the PID of an external process?
in thread How do you get the PID of an external process?

system(1, $cmd) is a special case. IIRC, a hack provided on the port of Perl for Windows to support IPC::Open3 there.

It just launches the given command on the background.