Re: Running a process in the background

The simplest method of doing this under Win32 is to put '1' as the first parameter to system.

system 1, q[put the command to run in the background here];

## The system command returns immediately.
## Do other things here.
[download]

Qudos for bringing this undocumented feature to light goes to tye.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"But you should never overestimate the ingenuity of the sceptics to come up with a counter-argument." -Myles Allen
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail "Time is a poor substitute for thought"--theorbtwo "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

Comment on Re: Running a process in the background Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Running a process in the background by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 23, 2004 at 23:36 UTC
IPC::Open2 and IPC::Open3 use `system 1` on Windows, and `fork` elsewhere (as appropriate), so I usually recommend these.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Running a process in the background by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Nov 23, 2004 at 23:54 UTC
I have to disagree with that as a default recommendation for the OPs stated requirement. If you need the complexity of those--Ie. You need to be able to intereact with the background process's input and output streams--that is a fine recommendation, but for simply running a processes in the background? Neither is exactly the easiest of modules to use, and the documentation of both leaves a lot to be desired. That one reverses the order of the first two parameters relative to the other is confusing enough. I can never remember, or work out from the descriptions whether RDRFH is a handle for reading, from the perspective of the perl script, or that of the command being run? I end up trying it to find out. That the descriptions are entirely geared to their use in a nix environment, with most of the description being deferred to man page references and useage with *nix utilities, mean I would avoid recommending the use of either to a win32 user, without there being a definite need to do so. Examine what is said, not who speaks. "But you should never overestimate the ingenuity of the sceptics to come up with a counter-argument." -Myles Allen "Think for yourself!" - Abigail "Time is a poor substitute for thought"--theorbtwo "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham "Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon	[reply]


Perl: the Markov chain saw
	PerlMonks