Using the system command with an ampersand at the end isn't running the process in the background

Question

I'm making a simple call to restore a mysql backup that takes about 45 minutes to complete on one of my servers.

system("mysql -u$user -p$pass $db < '$file' &");

Running it that way locks my browser and I have to wait until it's finished before I can do anything. This works fine on my other server. What settings could be preventing that from working on the first server?

Answer 1

You still have the "handle" to the output pipes (stdout && stderr) which prevents backgrounding fully.

append a > /dev/null 2>&1 to the end.