From: Dave Howell <groups@...>
Date: 2006-05-10T09:35:23+09:00
Subject: Re: What's the difference between a Thread and a Process?


On May 9, 2006, at 16:11, Ohad Lutzky wrote:
> I think the more notable difference is that threads share variables,
> whereas forks don't:

Aha. Now that's interesting. What DO forks share? Apparently Signals 
can move back and forth, to some degree....



This came up because I used Process to have a command-line script that 
gave me the prompt back without me having to use a & at the end of the 
command. Then I tried getting the 'main' path to hold up until the 
sub-process had completed it's initialization, but found that it wasn't 
possible to get information out of a Process. A Thread, sure, no 
problem asking for Thread.status. But not a Process. I didn't bother 
trying a Thread, though, since I rather suspected that the Thread would 
be unable to let my script actually complete and release the prompt.

Note: actually accomplishing the above task isn't required. I just 
fiddled with it to learn something. Which is another way of saying I 
don't currently need any suggestions on how I might accomplish that, 
especially if they're more than two or three lines of code. It's not 
worth the extra code. :)