Question

I want to offload a block of code in my main process to child process to make it run concurrently. I also want to have the PID of the spawned child process so I can monitor and kill it if necessary.

Answer 1

You can use the fork kernel method. Here is an example:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby puts 'This is the master process.'  child_pid = fork do   puts 'This is the child process'   exit end  puts 'The PID of the child process is #{child_pid}' 

The fork method returns the PID of the process it forks and executes any code in the block passed. Like regular Ruby blocks it keeps the bindings of the parent process.

It is a good idea to make your forked process exit.