Very Computer

I have a problem with cgi programming- I want a cgi script to start a
background process and finish.
I've got two scripts:

dontwait:

#! /bin/sh
wait.pl &
echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo
echo "Ok"
#############

and wait:

#! /usr/bin/perl
for (i=1;i<=200000;i++) {
#do a lot of computations
g=sqrt(2);

Quote:}

When I start the dontwait script from the shell it exits immediately while
wait does it's computations. But when I start dontwait as a cgi-script:
http://localhost/cgi-bin/dontwait it doesn't exit until wait finishes. How
should I force dontwait to exit as soon as it starts wait?

The web server is presumably waiting until the pipe between it and the CGI
script is closed before it closes the connection to the browser.  Since the
background process still has its stdout connected to the pipe, it won't
close until the background process completes.

If you have the background process close all its file descriptors, or
execute it with something like:

wait.pl </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &

then you shouldn't have to wait for it.

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