Is there a "spawn" equivalent for Ruby 1.8.7?

Question

Is there a spawn equivalent for ruby 1.8.7?

It appears as though it was introduced in 1.9.1 http://apidock.com/ruby/Kernel/spawn

I need the following to work in ruby 1.8.7:

def run_worker(queue, count = 1)
  puts "Starting #{count} worker(s) with QUEUE: #{queue}"
  ops = {:pgroup => true, :err => [(Rails.root + "log/resque_err").to_s, "a"], 
                          :out => [(Rails.root + "log/resque_stdout").to_s, "a"]}
  env_vars = {"QUEUE" => queue.to_s}
  count.times {
    ## Using Kernel.spawn and Process.detach because regular system() call would
    ## cause the processes to quit when capistrano finishes
    pid = spawn(env_vars, "rake resque:work", ops)
    Process.detach(pid)
  }
end

Answer 1

You can achieve this in 1.8.7 using this gem - https://github.com/rtomayko/posix-spawn. It does not support "full" 1.9's Process::spawn interface, but your example should work with it just by changing Process::spawn to POSIX::Spawn::spawn (https://github.com/rtomayko/posix-spawn#status).