How do I create a non-blocking system call in Ruby?

Question

I want to make a system call in ruby, but rather than wait for the process to terminate, I want my script to continue running.

What's the recommended way to handle this?

Answer 1

You can use Process.spawn.

Once the process is spawned, you can either wait for the process to terminate (using waitpid) or detach it.

Answer 2

See IO#popen in the standard library.

f = IO.popen("date")
f.gets # => "Wed Aug 10 14:56:59 MDT 2011\n"
f.close