"fork and exit" needed?

[Vincent Delporte]

Hi

	I'm a Python newbie, and would like to rewrite this Perl scrip
to be run with the Asterisk PBX:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+NetCID

Anyone knows if those lines are necessary, why, and what their
alternative is in Python?

-------
open STDOUT, '>/dev/null'; 
fork and exit;
-------

Thank you.