package spawn

SPAWN - spawning system process

Spawn is a small library exposing only one function: Spawn.spawn. Its purpose is to start command in the background. Spawn aims to provide a few missing features of Unix.create_process such as providing a working directory as well as improving error reporting and performance.

Errors such as directory or program not found are properly reported as Unix.Unix_error exceptions, on both Unix and Windows.

On Unix, Spawn uses vfork by default as it is often a lot faster than fork. There is a benchmark comparing Spawn.spawn to Unix.create_process in spawn-lib/bench. If you don't trust vfork, you can set the environment variable SPAWN_USE_FORK to make Spawn use fork instead.

Portability

Spawn is expected to be fully portable. However, so far it has only been tested on Linux, OSX and Windows.