running and managing background shell commands

[Charles G Waldman]

Dimitri Papadopoulos writes:

 > 
 > How can I rewrite this function? As far as I know:
 > 1) commands.getstatus cannot start a background command
 > 2) os.system does start a background command
 > 3) but $! is not available

os.system("command &") will start a command in the background