From: Luke <lbayes@...>
Date: 2007-03-23T13:25:07+09:00
Subject: Re: How do I properly spawn an external process on OS X from Ruby?

> On Mar 22, 7:38 pm, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> also there is a command line tool in OS X called (of all things) open

Hey John,

Thanks for the response. I'm using open in the example that I
provided, but open actually spawns a new process outside of Ruby and I
can't figure out how to tell when the launched application is closed.
Basically, the IO.popen("open -a #{some_app}") call gives me a handle
to the "open" process which is disconnected from the process that I'm
actually interested in.

It seems to do the same thing as:

sh ./some_app &

Is there some way to tell "open" that I want the process initiated and
"blocked"?

Gary,

Thanks for the heads up on the AppleScript gem, I checked that out
also and had some problems because I'm trying to deploy a cross-
platform gem and creating a dependency on those tools looked like they
may cause problems for win users. Gem auto-unpacked the exts when it
was resolving dependencies.

The closest thing I've come up with so far is initiating the process
with "open" and then using "ps -a" and regex to poll for the status of
the launched process. This is definitely pretty far from ideal, so I
would be surprised if that's what it's going to take.

Any ideas?


Thanks,


Luke Bayes
www.asunit.org