I am an inexperienced Perl hacker with a problem. I am writing a script that takes a long time to execute. Each invocation may take 2+ minutes to process. While the script is processing I do not want the user to have to wait. In short the script 1. lwp-rgets a website to a local copy 2. machine translates each file into 7 seven languages 3. post-process links so the files/links work on original site 4. tar/zips it 5. present this file to the user to install on their server Step 2 and 3 can take a while. If I use fork I have to wait for all child processes to end before exiting. If the end user gets bored they kill the script. I tried to following with little success: Write and display an html (temp) file which refreshes q 3 seconds. When the child process is complete the temp file is rewritten to refresh to the tar file for downloading. - Problem: child process dies on first refresh. No interim page - time out occurs somewhere along the line and process dies. besides no one will wait this long. My "Debug mode" - all debug text lines through script print to STDOUT/browser. Lots of info on the screen - and the processing works albeit after minutes of debug messages fill the screen. I would like the processing to be nearly instant but that is not possible since I do not have a couple hundred thousand lying around and I am alone. Given this I would like to present a "We are working on it" page and let the user move on. When the task is done the scrpit will email a link with the tar file for download presumably within a few minutes. The answer is probably simple but unfortunately my programming skills are limited. I appreciate any help. Ray
