Re: http waits on process

The problem is that when you call

`$myscript &`;
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You are essentially calling

`sh -c '$myscript &'`;
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In other words... you are waiting for the shell process to terminate... but the shell process (if it were interactive) would have returned a prompt imediately after firing off $myScript.

If you really want to fire off a background job from a perl process, and don't care about the output (btw: backticks imply that you do care about the output, but continuing imediately imply that you do not care about the output)... then you should do something more like this:

my $pid = fork;
die "Could not fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
if (!$pid) {
   exec $myScript;
}
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Which is somewhat akin to what the shell does when you launch the program foo by typing:

[user@host]$ foo &
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Re: Re: http waits on process by hotshot (Prior) on Jan 14, 2004 at 08:03 UTC
As I said, the problem happened only when I did it from cgi script through the web page, when I tried it from a regular script, I had no problem. Additionally, I already tried the solution you suggested (fork and exec), and still I get the same problem, I think it something related to apache that waits for stdout or someting (closing stdout, didn't work also). Do you have another idea? Hotshot	[reply]

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