How to start a background process in Python?

I’m trying to port a shell script to the much more readable python version. The original shell script starts several processes (utilities, monitors, etc.) in the background with “&”. How can I achieve the same effect in python? I’d like these processes not to die when the python scripts complete. I am sure it’s related to the concept of a daemon somehow, but I couldn’t find how to do this easily.

Sharing a complex object between processes?

I have a fairly complex Python object that I need to share between multiple processes. I launch these processes using multiprocessing.Process. When I share an object with multiprocessing.Queue and multiprocessing.Pipe in it, they are shared just fine. But when I try to share an object with other non-multiprocessing-module objects, it seems like Python forks these objects. Is that true?