On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Xavier NoõÍle <xavier.noelle / gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/3/2 Albert Schlef <albertschlef / gmail.com>:
>> Ruby tells the shell to execute the command (that's why you see "sh -c")
>> [...]
>
> Thanks for your explanations, but this is along the lines of what I
> already understood.
> I mentionned top to explain the problem more directly but I know that
> the problem is not due do top; in fact, I already use htop on both
> machines and the tree view showed me what I stated in my original
> post.
>
> To be more precise, the output of my script, on my Debian and Gentoo
> machines, looks like this:
> 6750
> 1
>
> These numbers are respectively the PID and parent PID of my process...init !
>
> But on my Ubuntu machine, it's something like:
> 16055
> 16050
>
> The first is the Ruby script's PID and the second is the PID of "sh -c".

What Ruby versions are you using?  Note that there are some changes
between 1.8 and 1.9 in this area, namely that system, IO.popen etc.
accept a list of strings which prevents passing the command to a
shell.

Although I may also be that the shell behaves differently on both systems.

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/