Forking and subshells - Keeping the parent active

I am finding this hard to find information on..

Running a bash script, that is setup to fork a subshell (also a bash script)

Want the parent to keep running while the child is doing its processing.

There is a trap in the parent script to make it sleep if the child runs
over time. The communication of this event is a simple "while -f
filename" in the parent that is setup by a "touch filename" at the start
of the child script and a subsequent "rm -f filename" at the end.

Not rocket science or anything!

Within the parent script the fork is simply;

sh childscript

within a for next loop

What is happening is that the parent stops until the child has finished.
The parent has a semi time critical role so this isnt so good!

How do you do this? Was also thinking of using startproc but havent
tried yet.

Tnxs Bob

.

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