[alexk]

1. No if you don't call wait on child. Make sure to collect the status though in case if child has crashed for some reason otherwise you will end up with zombie:

  syscall.Wait4(-1, &wait, syscall.WNOHANG, nil)

I would also recommend to use a higer level StartProcess instead

2. You can pass any arguments when starting a child, or even execute completely different binary:

  p, err := os.StartProcess(path, os.Args, &os.ProcAttr{
    Dir: wd,
    Env: os.Environ(),
    Files: files,
    Sys: &syscall.SysProcAttr{},
  })