How do you spawn a child process in Ruby?

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

Answer 1

In addition to Chris' great answer, remember to call Process.wait from your master in order to reap your child process, else you'll leave zombies behind.

Example as requested in comments:

pid = Process.fork do
  puts "child, pid #{Process.pid} sleeping..."
  sleep 5
  puts "child exiting"
end

puts "parent, pid #{Process.pid}, waiting on child pid #{pid}"
Process.wait
puts "parent exiting"