----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Reimer Behrends" <behrends / cse.msu.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 1:32 AM
Subject: Re: a problem of waitting and printting out message


> Maggie Xiao (mxiao / ee.ualberta.ca) wrote:
> [...]
> >  I should construct a program which should wait for the specified time
> >  and then print out the specified message. Meanwhile control of the
> >  shell should be returned to the user. ie. The program must be
> >  non-blocking. is there any way to construct it in pure ruby way? Or
> >  my only way is to using extending ruby with c?
> 
> Is the following what you are looking for?
> 
> if fork then
>   # parent process
>   exit!
> else
>   # child process
>   sleep 10
>   puts "Now!"
> end

I think Maggie is a Windows user (unless my
memory is wrong). And this solution won't
work on Windows.

Since leaving the Cygwin DLL behind, we have
lost fork() and popen3 and gained a thread-
related bug that cripples many apps.

Probably one of those situations where you
have to take two steps back in order to 
take three steps forward.

Hal