Executing a program (a quick question)

Ruby
1

Hi!

I want to launch a program and I don’t care about its return value or
output. I also don’t want it to block my ruby program.

On Linux I do this as follows:

if !fork
system(“xpdf /path/to/some/file”)
exit!
# … or exec() …
end

But it doesn’t work on MS-Windows… it complains that fork() isn’t
implemented.

So how do I launch a program on MS-Windows without it blocking me and
without caring about its output and return status?

2

Albert S. wrote:

Hi!

I want to launch a program and I don’t care about its return value or
output. I also don’t want it to block my ruby program.

On Linux I do this as follows:

if !fork
system(“xpdf /path/to/some/file”)
exit!
# … or exec() …
end

But it doesn’t work on MS-Windows… it complains that fork() isn’t
implemented.

So how do I launch a program on MS-Windows without it blocking me and
without caring about its output and return status?

You may use the win32-process gem that implements #fork as far as I
know, or simply IO.popen:

IO.popen(“your command”)
#Just go on here

Marvin

PS: On Linux I think the #spawn method does this task best.

3

Albert S. wrote:

# ... or exec() ...

end

But it doesn’t work on MS-Windows… it complains that fork() isn’t
implemented.

So how do I launch a program on MS-Windows without it blocking me and
without caring about its output and return status?

Thread.new do
system("…")
end

This works on windows as well as platforms with fork.