detached 0.1.7

Detached

Spawn detached processes in D.

Note: Phobos got this kind of functionality in version 2.076, so this library is no longer needed. Use spawnProcess with Config.detached flag instead. If Config.detached is available during the compilation this library fallbacks to the Phobos version.

Before version 2.076 standard D library did not provide a way to start detached process and required to wait on a returned Pid. Without waiting you would have got zombie processes (resource leakage) if parent process outlives its child.

detached solves this problem by introducing the spawnProcessDetached function which has almost the same API as spawnProcess.

Features

• Run process detached, i.e. with no need to wait.
• Actually reports errors from exec- functions unlike spawnProcess which just checks if executable and working directory exist before fork and hopes their states leave unchanged before exec. (Note: this is no longer the case. It was fixed in phobos 2.075)

Missing features

• A way to close standard streams in spawned process (e.g. for daemon creation).

Examples

Spawn

Simple program demonstrating the usage of spawnProcessDetached.

dub run :spawn  -- --workdir=/usr/local -- pwd
dub run :spawn  -- --stdout=/dev/null --stderr=/dev/null -- vlc
dub run :spawn -- -v HELLO=WORLD -- sh -c 'echo $HELLO'