Fork exec and not wait?

[packetstormer]

Good evening
I was reading perldoc about fork and noticed this:

"Calling exec() within a pseudo-process actually spawns the requested executable in a separate process and waits for it to complete before exiting with the same exit status as that process"

I have noticed that if my forked process returns any output the parent process waits and in turn splats my application!
Is there anyway to either fork a process and force its output to /dev/null or simply make the parent ignore the child and continue?

I need to grab the PID of the fork to manage it later..