how i can follow to execute external programs: define, that they don’t
hung with Kernel method system or another? may be use timeout?
excuse me for my bad english 
you may try something along this line:
timeout(10) do
%x{sleep 12}
end
rescue Timeout::Error
Do something to handle the time out.
puts “The sleep command timed out”
end
Hope that gets you going in a good direction.
BenH
On Apr 15, 7:41 am, Svetlana Vt [email protected]
Excuse the self reply - something that comes in handy is to capture
the exit status of the external application. To do this use
$?.exitstatus
%x{echo “Hello World”}
puts $?.exitstatus