Re: Perl Background processes in Windows

[mpeg4codec]

The most portable way of doing this that I can think of is to use fork followed by exec. Consider the following:

sub run_in_bg {
    my $pid = fork;
    die "Can't fork a new process" unless defined $pid;

    # child gets PID 0
    if ($pid == 0) {
        exec(@_) || die "Can't exec $_[0]";
    }

    # in case you wanted to use waitpid on it
    return $pid;
}

You'd call this the same way you'd call system, except now it forks a new process before running the first arg.

[chaos_cat]

Be careful with that solution. Fork on windows is emulated using threads, not real processes. See perlfork doc. This may not matter for your application, but you should be aware of it.