From: khaines@...
Date: 2006-07-12T01:46:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Processes and Portability

> I would like to run a process concurrently (thus if the process goes to
> sleep or runs forever, I can still run other code from my main process)
> and have all standard out of that process be put into a text file.  I
> would also like this code to be portable.  And finally, I would like to
> be able to kill this process at any time (So I will need the pid)
>
> This thus eliminates the use of fork.  Also, I have tried:

If you are doing the equivalent of fork/exec, here's some code that is in 
my IOWA package that will help.  It depends on Daniel Berger's 
win32-process library, which can be found at RubyForge:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/win32utils

It, in turn, is dependent on window-pr, found at the same URL.

This code has been tested on Linux and WinXP.  You should be able to adapt 
it to your purposes.



module IWATestSupport
   def self.create_process(args)
     @fork_ok = true unless @fork_ok == false
     pid = nil
     begin
       raise NotImplementedError unless @fork_ok
       unless pid = fork
         Dir.chdir args[:dir]
         exec(*args[:cmd])
       end
     rescue NotImplementedError
       @fork_ok = false

       begin
         require 'rubygems'
       rescue LoadError
       end

       begin
         require 'win32/process'
       rescue LoadError
         raise "Please install win32-process."
       end

       cwd = Dir.pwd
       Dir.chdir args[:dir]
       pid = Process.create(:app_name => args[:cmd].join(' '))
       Dir.chdir cwd
     end
     pid
   end
end


Kirk Haines