From: khaines@...
Date: 2007-02-04T04:03:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Creating child processes in Windows?

On Sun, 4 Feb 2007, Sonny Chee wrote:

> Since fork is not implimented in Windows, how do you spawn subprocesses
> in Windows?  Does anyone have a good (Cross Platform) solution besides
> Ruby Threads?

Here's something that I use as part of my test support package for IOWA. 
It's used primarily to provide a cross platform method for doing fork & 
execs of processes for testing, but could, with a little TLC, be made more 
general.

It depends on win32/process (By Daniel Berger, available on rubyforge or 
via "gem install win32-process") to create processes on Windows.


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 Exception
       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