From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2009-08-25T08:07:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Asynchronous process to process pipe IO


On Aug 24, 2009, at 6:50 PM, Mike Barsalou wrote:
>
> Would Ruby's fork behave exactly like system here, or would it have a
> third path?  Likely fork wouldn't be an option for the OP because he
> wants to process the output?

fork and exec are the 'primitive' operations.

system is basically implemented by forking and having the child
process exec the new program while the parent waits for it to
complete. System() is just a convenience method for this
common pattern.

Capturing the output of a program basically means using fork/exec
along with rearranging the standout output of the exec'ed
program. For simple cases this is handled by Ruby's backtick syntax:

output = `program_to_run`

Gary Wright