Let me preface my question by saying that I HAVE read numerous different posts on SO as well as web searches and have been unable to find anything that fits my exact situation.
The problem is quite simple, actually. I have a CGI script (Perl) serving up dynamic pages on web server, and when a user loads a certain page, I want to have the CGI script call a .pl file using system() to do some "housekeeping". This is running in a Windows NT environment.
The CGI script for testing purposes is test1.pl or test1.cgi, e.g. "https://www.awebsite.com/test1.pl".
test1.pl (cgi script that generates web pages)
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "Hello user, this is a test page.";
system("start C:/path/to/script/test2.pl");
print "Page is fully loaded and housekeeping is being done, even though this page is now fully loaded";
test2.pl (separate .pl file that is doing "housekeeping", asynchronously from what test1.pl is doing)
#!/usr/bin/perl
#just a counter that takes a while to complete, to verify test2.pl is running
for ($x=0; $x <= 100000; $x++){print "$x ";}
Ok, so keep in mind this is for testing operations, not functionality. When running test1.pl from command line, it works fine.
When running test1.pl from a browser, this keeps prompting "openWith.exe" on the server (viewed in Task Manager). My .pl files are executable, so it's not a matter of an unknown file type or not knowing to run with Perl command line interpreter. I cannot figure out what is going on here and why it will not run the system command from test1.pl when called through web interface.
There are NO parameters being passed from user input. test1.pl simply needs to run test2.pl to do some housekeeping, but I cannot have test1.pl waiting for test2.pl to complete before continuing. So, test2.pl should be started by test1.pl and continue running - meanwhile, test1.pl has already finished doing its thing. I do not need or want to capture any output from test2.pl .
I hope I have explained this clearly. I have used simple examples, even though the actual code will be much more complex. At this point, it's not even running these simple example scripts so the actual functioning code is not important at this time.
Thank you to anyone who can help me. By the way, I tried setting "full control" permissions for test1.pl and this didn't help. Again, this "openwith.exe" is really throwing me for a loop here.
Finally figured it out (as usual, on my own). Turns out Schwern, you were on the right track. Even though the .pl file association was established through control panel to open with Perl Command Line Interpreter, there was a problem with a windows file type association (blahblahblah that I don't even fully understand). I finally found the answer to the TRUE problem here: Perl not running in Windows 10
In particular, this part here:
You must create a file association between the .pl file extension and the Perl runtime. At a command prompt type the following.assoc .pl=PerlScript ftype PerlScript=c:\perl\bin\perl.exe %1 %*
I hope that this helps SOMEONE down the road who might be encountering this same problem.