Script Terminator?

Benjamin McLemore (analyst@Onramp.NET)
Wed, 7 Sep 1994 10:43:05 -0500


Hi!

I have read all of the docs available at hoohoo about CGI under the NSCA
server, but I'm still a little confused...

I'm trying to execute a script that will return via e-mail some information
to an email address that is supplied in a form, but I don't want the user
to have to wait for the script to finish executing before he gets a
response from the server saying "blah blah Your information will be mailed
to you blah blah."

I'm using Perl, I've tried making my pipes hot to no avail--it seems that
the server doesn't give the client anything until the script is done.

I've tried forking a child process to do the analysis and mail the results,
leaving the parent process to report the HTML and terminate, but as soon as
the parent terminates, the server must be killing the shell in which the
child resides because it is terminated immediately too!

I'm not much of a Unix hacker yet, so apologies if this is some Unix trivia
that I need to know.

I'd appreciate any help!

--
Benjamin McLemore
Electric Orbit
analyst@onramp.net