running and managing background shell commands

[Dimitri Papadopoulos]

Hi,

I am translating this shell function to Python:

	_new_browser() {
		# start Netscape in the background
		# this will always return 0, even in the face of a failure...
		netscape "$*" &
		# ... so wait a few seconds, and check that Netscape is still alive
		i=3
		while [ $i -gt 0 ]
		do
			sleep 1
			ps -p $! > /dev/null || return 1
			i=`expr $i - 1`
		done
		return 0
	}

How can I rewrite this function? As far as I know:
1) commands.getstatus cannot start a background command
2) os.system does start a background command
3) but $! is not available
Do I have to fork and then execv - which is probably what the shell does anyway?