If you are looking to run a child process in the background while returning quickly without killing the child process in Python, os.fork() works very well. I'm using this strategy to list all the s3 objects of a bucket to return only the last one, which takes 8min30s. Of course we don't want a synchronous call here.
@intrbiz Sure. If your main program can afford to wait for the child process or thread to finish, don't use os.fork.