Understanding fork

[neilwatson]

Brothers and Sisters, please consider this CGI script:

#doing stuff up here.

my $pid;

if (!defined ($pid = fork)){ 
    DieNice("Unable to fork: $!\n");
}elsif (! $pid){
    close(STDIN);
    close(STDOUT);
    close(STDERR);
}else{
    print header, 
      start_html,
      h2('Sending Mail...'),
      "\t<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"5; url=http://mydomain
+.com:8090\">\n",
      end_html;
      #Here the user is redirected.
}
 

while (<@to>){
    chomp($_);
    push @chunk, $_;
    $count ++;
    if ($count == 80){ #splits bcc into small chuncks
        $to = join ",", @chunk; 
        mailout();
        $count = 0;
        @chunk = ();
    }
}

#still doing more time consuming stuff...

I want the user to be redirected and freed from the CGI while it continues to run its code. Is this the correct way to do it? I borrowed this code from a usenet article but I don't fully understand it. Can someone please explain how this works and if it's correct?

Thank you,

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca