From: Thiago Arrais <thiago.arrais@...>
Date: 2006-09-01T02:07:10+09:00
Subject: Spawning daemon processes

I am trying to start and stop a daemon process from inside my Ruby
program. At first I tried using fork to do the job, as in

server_pid = fork do
  system 'runserver'
end

Then I could use the returned PID to send the process a signal by
using Process.kill. But, as far as i know, fork unfortunately doesn't
work on Windows. I read somewhere I should be using Thread.new if I
want the code to be platform independent, like this:

thread = Thread.new do
  system 'runserver'
end

The question is: how do I kill the subprocess when using threads? I
tried thread.kill and thread.stop, but they won't do the trick. When
using threads, what I get are a lot of orphan processes after the
initial Ruby program finishes.

Is there any idiomatic way of doing that in Ruby that is platform independent?

Cheers,

Thiago Arrais
-- 
Mergulhando no Caos - http://thiagoarrais.blogspot.com
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