Waiting for multiple child processes to finish

Ruby
1

Why does this not work (it waits for each process to finish before
launching the next):

$stdout.sync = true

10.times {|i|
pid = Process.fork {
puts “launching process #{i}”
3.times {
sleep 0.5
puts “hello from process #{i}”
}
}
Thread.new { Process.waitpid(pid) }.join
}

puts “done!”

but this does:

$stdout.sync = true

pids = []
10.times {|i|
pids << Process.fork {
puts “launching process #{i}”
3.times {
sleep 0.5
puts “hello from process #{i}”
}
}
}

pids.each {|pid| Thread.new { Process.waitpid(pid) }.join }
puts “done!”

2

On 13/11/06, Martin DeMello [email protected] wrote:

  puts "hello from process #{i}"

$stdout.sync = true
}

pids.each {|pid| Thread.new { Process.waitpid(pid) }.join }
puts “done!”

The join in the first solution forces the thread (and forked process)
to finish before continuing onto starting the next fork. In the second
solution all the processes are forked first before waiting. You can
probably rewrite that last loop simply as:
pids.each{|pid| Process.waitpid(pid)}

Farrel