forking an external process

hi

I want my gui to be accesable even when an external process is doing
some work.
My program does the following:
initialise the GUI
exec of a wget process
wait for it to return 
do somthing to the return which will update the GUI (add rows to a
clist)

as it is now it hangs while the wget process is running. I have tried to
fork it but it doesnt work:
sub getnews{
  $clist->clear();
  if (fork() == 0) {    
   exec("wget http://www.slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf -nv -q -O \
slashdot.rdf");
   exit(0);
  }
  parse_xml();
}

what have I done wrong? the parse_xml part is only to be runned when the
exec has returned somthing

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