From: nobu.nokada@...
Date: 2004-01-05T19:51:03+09:00
Subject: Re: background child process

Hi,

At Sat, 3 Jan 2004 07:32:51 +0900,
Joel VanderWerf wrote:
> How can one start a background child process in a platform independent 
> manner (i.e., no fork)?

I agree it should be there and kind of feel I've suggested it a
couple times.

> Anyway, I don't know if the 'system "something&"' construct even works 
> on windows (I'm not near a windows box today, or I'd test it).

No.

> Can I do this with pipes? How will I know when the child has exited or died?

$ ruby -e 'f = IO.popen("sleep 5"); p Process.waitpid(f.pid); p $?'
14425
#<Process::Status: pid=14425,exited(0)>

> I'm reluctant to use pipes because I don't care about stdin/stdout and 
> don't want to worry about whether win32 support is ok. I don't need 
> pipes for commuication, since I'm communicating among processes by 
> writing and reading locked files. Aside from that, all I need to know 
> from the child is when it is done. (That's the only reason I wanted it 
> to be a child in the first place, so that I could use Process.wait or 
> Process.waitpid on it.)

IO.popen works on also Windows.

-- 
Nobu Nakada