Background processing / forking

hey, i wanted to know if there's a fork function in php, cause i don't see it in the manual. I basically wanna call a C program from PHP. Now the problem is that the C program will be running for longs periods like maybe half or even an hour. So i would basically want to just execute the program and return control to the script immediately so that the c program continues it's work. it's easy with forking. but i dont see it in php. thx. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/