From: Nathan Witmer <nwitmer@...>
Date: 2006-11-10T23:59:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Starting a system command and letting it be?

> What's the best way to do this?

Have a look at BackgrounDRb, it's a rails plugin designed specifically
for this type of thing: kicking off long-running tasks without making
rails wait for it to finish. You'll still probably use system() for
running your script, but if you use one of the popens (2, 3, or 4) you
can get stdout and feed that back to the rails app incrementally.

Here's an introductory article: http://www.infoq.com/articles/BackgrounDRb
and the rubyforge page: http://rubyforge.org/projects/backgroundrb/