Using fork from within a shell script.

There really isn't a fork command that you would use from within a shell script.
fork() is a system call used by compiled programs to create another process.
It is trivially easy to create new processes within a shell script - in fact unix shells
are nothing more than environments for running many processes, and linking
them together into working solutions.

So is there any other way I can kickoff another program from the current one, without blocking it? More specifics: I need to kickoff a perl program from within a shell script and have them both running...Is there a way to accomplish this?
Thanks.

Thanks brettmjohnson. That did the trick. Should have thought of that before....alas!!! a newbie.