How to spawn a windows process without blocking?

["Yuanming Chen" <yuanming@...>]

Recently I started to use LUA to write simple scripts to launch windows executables. But I noticed that when I call os.execute("notepad.exe") to spawn notepad application, the execution thread is blocked till one closes the notepad. Is there a way to execute the window executable without blocking? In my project, I don't care about whether the window executable is started correctly or not. 

Thanks for any thoughts on this.