From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-03-31T04:47:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Process Mgmt wrapper?

In article <3CA5C55C.8050105@imperitek.com>,
David Corbin  <dcorbin@imperitek.com> wrote:
>David Corbin wrote:
>
>> 1) I am aware of the Process module, as well as Kernel
>> 2) I need to be able to
>>    a) launch an external processes
>>    b) provide access to process status (running, terminated cleanly, 
>> abnormaly terminated)
>>    c) prevent another instance of *this* process from being launched
>>    d) perhaps process some of the output "on demand"
>
>One more thing I'd like to see:
>        e) it should be able to "recover" if the parent process 
>dies/terminates and gets restarted.
>
>>   I know I can do all this from ruby, but it's a bit involved.  My 
>> question is, has anyone written a class wraps all this up in simple 
>> interface?
>>


And I would add one more thing:
f) provides a common frontend for dealing with both Unix and Win32 
processess.

I agree - we could probably use something a bit more OO than the Process 
module.  It might be nice for it to work like:


timeout = 1000 #1000 seconds to complete
p = Process.new(timout) { |parentPID,inputHandle,outputHandle|
    ... some stuff to do ... 
}
p.id #=> 1234
p.running? #=> true
p.timedout? #=> false
p.status #=> :running, :normal_exit, :killed
p.get #=> get output from process
sleep 20
p.kill #kill the process


Phil