Different take on what you are asking (maybe even on topic ;) ) - perldoc -f fork may be a good start. If I am understanding you correctly, you are asking to be able to kick off a process remotely (via the web in your example) and have it continue to run after you close your browser, shutdown your local desktop (not where the program actually resides), etc. If this is a correct understanding, I'd suggest looking into fork() for seperating the monitor code from the call to kick it off. You may want to consider some of the IO::Net modules (or related variants, of course) for being able to connect to the monitor output, as well as performing some of the network related tasks. Is this what you intended? Or am I being both off topic and naive here? (Yes, I've used both Big Brother and Nagios, nice, blah, etc., andmuch quicker than writing your own - but there's always a value in doing it yourself if you have the time).
"I have never written bad code. There are merely unanticipated features."
