Hello all.
I’m puzzled by the behaviour of Process.spawn. Allow me to
illustrate, with the following short program:
puts ‘Executing first command…’
Process.spawn ‘sh -c :’
sleep 2 # give it time to finish
puts ‘Executing second command…’
Process.spawn ‘:’
On my system (which runs Debian Linux 6.0), the output is as follows:
Executing first command…
Executing second command…
spawn-experiment:4:in spawn': No such file or directory - : (Errno::ENOENT) from spawn-experiment:4:in ’
strace' shows that, for the second call to spawn’, ruby tries
to execute the command directly, without passing it to the shell.
This appears to contradict the documentation at [1]. Is this a bug?
[1] Module: Process (Ruby 1.9.3)
Some details about my setup. The output of “ruby -v” is:
ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-linux]
The output of “uname -a” is:
Linux asteroid 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Sun Sep 23 10:07:46 UTC 2012
x86_64 GNU/Linux