Starting a non blocking child process

Rails
1

From a ruby program I would like to start another process which should
continue to run even after the parent process dies.
Is there any way I could achive this?

From the child process I want to start an instance of SCGI server which
should continue to run even if the parent process dies.

Thanks in Advance,
Jatinder

2

After spending a while with google, I found following…

  1. Fork is not present on Windows; will have to use Win32-process module
    for
    enabling fork.
  2. Threads are the way to achiveve platform independence in such cases.
  3. Daemons module(support for POSIX systems) can be used for creating
    daemons.
    http://rubyforge.org/projects/daemons/.

I tried using threads from one of the methods of a controller of an RoR
application; I have following method in my controller which gets called
when
a link is clicked in one of the rhtml pages.

def servst
threads =[]
threads<< Thread.new {
system ‘cd C:\InstantRails\rails_apps\xyz &
C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin\ruby
C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin\scgi_service’
}

threads.each { |t| t.join}
end
when this method is called(on click of a link in an rhtml page), I.E.
progress bar goes on showing some progress, but never completes.
Note: The server I intend to start does gets started; but the current
session from where the server was started gets hung.
I need a way to start the server and continue traversing various links
in
the same session.

Thanks
Jatinder