Asynchronous shell command in Emacs

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi,

I am looking at a problem where xdg-open does not work when called
asynchronously from Emacs (from `start-process-shell-command', or
`shell-command' with a trailing &).  It works just fine when called
synchronously.

So my question is, what are the differences between how Emacs does the
two?  I see the script runs successfully in both cases.  I know this
since I turn on tracing and see it exits with status 0 always; just the
appropriate GUI application fails to open.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Cheers,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.