For security reasons, you might want to be very careful building CGI that runs long or background processes. Could an accident-prone or malicious user kick off many concurrent processes, crashing the machine or corrupting the results?

Instead of a direct fork()/exec() solution, I would recommend using some sort of indirection or queue, like writing a flag to a file, or a record to a database. A second script then checks for the flag and runs the long process. If the process can wait a minute before starting, the script to check could be fired by cron (or Task Scheduler in Win) every minute and just exit if no flag is found.

You can even have the second process then occasionally write a record back, or create an HTML page with its status. (I guess you could do that either way, but it's still a good idea to be able to keep tabs on a long process.)

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Spring: Forces, Coiled Again!

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