Programming Ruby 3.3

Running Multiple External Processes

Sometimes you may want to split a task into several process-sized chunks—maybe to take advantage of all those cores in your shiny new processor. Or perhaps you need to run a separate process that was not written in Ruby. Not a problem: Ruby has a number of methods by which you may spawn and manage separate processes.

Spawning New Processes

You have several ways to spawn a separate process. The easiest is to run some command and wait for it to complete. You may find yourself doing this to run a system command or retrieve data from the host system. Ruby lets you spawn a process with the system or by using backquote (or backtick) methods:

system("tar xzf test.tgz") # => true
spawn("date")              # => 38483\nThu ...