> >How can I get remove the second cron?
> 
> you also need to close (or redirect) stderr.  cron (presumably) still
> has a pipe to that and will wait for it to end.

I'm afraid I must be doing something even more silly than this, because
even with:

@reboot			<path-to-script>/<my-script>  2>&1  >/dev/null

the second instance of cron remains.  FWIW, the script is a perl script
and does:

if (fork() != 0) { exit(0); }

before doing anything, which has the desired effect at the command prompt
of causing it to disappear off into the background.  


Any thoughts?

David.