spawn or fork

[C Gillespie]

> What are you trying to do exactly? If you provide more explanations, we
may
> provide a better help than the simplistic one above.
Dear All,

Thanks for the suggestions.

Basically, I have the situation where a user (via the web) requests data
from a database that has to be written to file. However, this takes a couple
of minutes. So the way I thought of doing this is:
1. create an empty file.
2a. tell the user where to look for the file.
2b. spawn a process to insert data into the file.

This way the user can see the data as its being written.

Thanks

Colin