Dumb question - how to fork in a shell script

[Kevin Buettner]

On Nov 6,  1:46am, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:

> If a program calls a shell script, how can the shell script execute another
> shell script in the background, in such a way that the second script will
> keep executing after the first one exits?  I tried just appending an
> ampersand, but it seems like the second script is being killed as soon
> as the first one exits.  I thought maybe exec does this, but the bash
> man page says that "exec command" causes the command to replace the 
> shell as the current process, rather than to start a new process.  I
> need it to actually fork instead.
> 
> The context is that I'm trying to get vgetty to convert the .rmd files
> (some weird sound format) into .wav files as it receives them, but that
> causes vgetty to block until this conversion process is done, and it 
> can't answer the phone again until it's done.  The conversion should be
> a background process.

Try something like the following:

    (command &)&

This does a double fork.

Kevin