Display progress or partial results in browser window

Hi.

I've written an agent (using Mech) to search for audiobooks and eAudio 
books in several libraries. As this takes quite a while, I'd like to be 
able to make the browser display progress results.

I can launch the agent and then launch another script in a browser that 
reads periodically from a file written by the agent. But this seems like 
an awkward solution.

I have very little experience with interprocess control, but I thought I 
should be able to launch the spider script to run in the background with 
a system call and then redirect to a perl script that will refresh 
periodically and display the books (or number of books) retrieved in a 
browser window. But I haven't been get the browser to do anything until 
the child process is finished.

There is a script published in Linux magazine by Randal Schwartz 
http://www.linux-mag.com/content/view/1122/2222/ that works along these 
lines, but it doesn't work on my Win32 machine. (Its example of a long 
process is  "exec traceroute" -- the only change I made was to make this 
   Win32's "exec tracert" )

I've tried to find the solution in Learning Perl, the Perl Cookbook and 
Perl FAQ, but the material dealing with IPC seems geared to running from 
the command line.

Is there a basic tutorial that covers  forking thing somewhere?

Thx,

Bruce

-- 
Bruce McKenzie
http://www.2MinuteExplainer.com