This was one of my favourite C functions ever. I don't remember when I first wrote it but I think I recreated it at least a couple of times on different projects (possibly for different employers):

I'd use it to spawn a pthread thread which would go and do something that might take a while and whose result I didn't care about.

I found some of this code (complete with original README, ca. 2000 A.D.) on an old hard drive and put it into a respository imaginatively named CServer as it is TCP server code written in C.