I ran into this problem just the other day. I had a time consuming database operation i wanted to happen right after a certain page call, but didn't want to make the client wait while i did it. So, fork, close STDOUT and STDERR and do my business. I remember when it dawned on me that the parent was outrunning the child to completion (as was my intention of course) and I'd lose the $dbh when it got there. After a brief affair with $dbh->clone() I decided to punt: just set a flag and made a cron job...

but maybe we'll go look at that again....

Thanks kyle!