I've got a script that kicks off an app for a user. The developer likes to release things in "useable by sys admins, and not users" state, so I have to make it useable for the user.

The program is basically in two parts. A server and a GUI. The script takes arguments, and based on these arguments, will export some environment variables, kick off the server, then kick off the GUI.

Up until recently, this worked fine. However, I now need to run two back ends, and two GUI's. They communicate on dfiferent ports, and if I start everything up manually from the terminal, there is no problem. However, if I run the script twice, the second instance will kill the first instance. What I think is happening, is the 2nd server process is killing the first (and in turn, the GUI).

Since I can start two servers and two GUI's manually, all fingers are pointing to my script. I don't know too much about kicking off multiple system calls from a single perl script (like if it's a good or bad idea) so I'm a bit at a loss. Any help is appreciated.

Here's a very dumbed down version of the code. It should suffice.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $server  = $ARGV[0];
my $client  = $ARGV[1];
my $display = $ARGV[2];
my $variable = $ARGV[3];

$ENV{"DISPLAY"} = $display . ":0.0";

my $bin = "/usr/local/bin/";


my $port = "2222" . ( $variable + 1 );
$ENV{"PORT"} = $port;

#Start the server
my $server_path = $bin . $server;
system "$server_path &";
sleep 2;

# Start up the client
my $client_path = $bin . $client;
system "$client_path";
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