Perl redirect browser and keep processing - perl

Question

This works fine (redirecting to a different domain):
#! /usr/bin/perl
print "Location:http://AnyDomainBesidesMyOwn.com/\n\n";
close(STDOUT); close(STDIN); close(STDERR);
[some long process]
But the following way stalls the browser, refusing to redirect until the long process is finished. The only change from above is that I'm redirecting to another page on the same domain the script is running from.
#! /usr/bin/perl
print "Location:http://MyOwnDomain.com/\n\n";
close(STDOUT); close(STDIN); close(STDERR);
[some long process]
I know I can get this to work by forking a new process, but there's got to be a simpler way...right?
UPDATE: Here is the output I get from Live Headers in Firefox:
http://example.com/test3.cgi
GET /test3.cgi HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:31:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://example.com/
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 187
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
And then after it deigns to redirect:
http: //example.com/ [Have to include the space b/c stackoverflow limits the number of links I can include in a post]
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:31:54 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
X-Mod-Pagespeed: 0.10.21.2-1381 [Same problem even on a domain w/o pagespeed installed]
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
MS-Author-Via: DAV
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache
Content-Length: 12189
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html

Answer 1

I believe I have found a solution after some trial and error. The key is to use fork() and exit the parent process. Then close all the file handles in the child process:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Location: ../myHomePage.htm\n\n";
exit 0 if fork();
close(STDIN);
close(STDOUT);
close(STDERR);
# do some long process
open(SM, "| /usr/sbin/sendmail -ti -odq);
⋮
In my case, the mail program was taking several seconds to accept the message and queue it. The webpage seemed very sluggish. After implementing the above, the redirect happenes instantly and several seconds later the message appeares in the mail log.

Answer 2

You should exit after a redirect header sent out. If I am correct a space is needed after 'Location:'. You could use CGI redirect method to achive this.
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Location: http://MyOwnDomain.com/\n\n";
close(STDOUT); close(STDIN); close(STDERR);
exit 0;
Redirect with CGI: http://perldoc.perl.org/CGI.html#GENERATING-A-REDIRECTION-HEADER
use CGI; # load CGI routines
$q = CGI->new;
print $q->redirect('http://somewhere.else/in/movie/land');