Question

Background:
Ruby script is packaged into an executable using OCRA 1.2.

Script is structured as follows:

begin
  <some code that runs for a while>
ensure
  <cleanup code>
end

Problem:
When I run the executable on Windows, it opens up a console window, and runs as usual. If I were to hit Ctrl-C, the cleanup code will run. But if I were to close the console window, the cleanup code doesn’t run.

Is there anyway to ensure that the cleanup code would run, even in this scenario?

---

Side note: I am from a Java background, first time using Ruby.

Answer 1

Sort of. You need background processing, but unfortunately (1) under Windows IO.popen is not very reliable., and (2) even the windows “start /B” command is just going to run the code in a (shared) console.

So…if you really need this, and you need to see the output of your program, you’ll want to install a Windows service. You could either put the critical code directly into the service or pass it the name of your executable & voila! It’ll run in the background.

So the user would have to put some real effort into killing the app, and if you need the program’s output to go to the console, you could have the service return the necessary text.

If you don’t need to see output, you can run the app with rubyw.exe and suppress the console. Potentially you might have your app start a second .rb file using something like start rubyw my_app.rb, depending on your requirements.

Probably not the answer you wanted, but it should work. If you really, really need it to.