exec, passthru, or backticks won't fork?

Using PHP 3.0.16 on Apache 1.3.9 on Linux. I'm trying to run a rather long program in the background when a user selects it from a webpage (kind of a "start this import program manually" page) for users to do a database import. The import can take up to several hours to run, so it's impractical for the process to tie up the browser in the foreground. I can't seem to find a way to fork this huge process in the background and let it go it's merry way. I did find on php.net a C wrapper which supposedly supports this, and indeed it works, but not entirely (not sure why, since I know jack about C), as the process seems to die off midway (buffer overflow perhaps?). The cron job shown below is actually a perl script which does a huge import from a remote text file (using rsh) and imports locally to Mysql. Anyway, here's the code: <? # using a call to a C program called "fork" which forks process in bg. # uncommenting #2# below would run it, with output to page. if ($submit) { exec("fork /etc/cron.daily/carma.cron & 2>&1"); #2#exec("/etc/cron.daily/carma.cron &"); } And the C code that I stole which doesn't QUITE work: /* fork.c */ #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int pid; pid=fork(); if (pid!=0) { close(STDOUT_FILENO); close(STDIN_FILENO); close(STDERR_FILENO); execl(argv[1],argv[2],0); } return 0; } Please tell me what I'm missing. Thanks in advance...