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Message: [QUOTE="Luke, post: 4553924"] I've been struggling with this for quite a long time now (weeks?) and figure it's time to get some advice from folks that know what they're doing. Essentially, I am trying to launch an OSX GUI application (The Adobe Flash Player) from a ruby process, send this new process a file target to open, and keep a handle to this process so that I can find out when it exits, or even force it to exit in some circumstances. I have had no trouble at all performing this task in the Windows XP Shell and Cygwin, but OS X is giving me much heartache. The Flash Player does not read or write to standard in, standard out or standard error, so I'm not sure if popen is really the way to go or not. If you're going to try this at home, you'll need three things: 1) A SWF File 2) The desktop debug Flash Player for OS X 3) The attached ruby script Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to distribute the Flash Player, so you'll have to grab it from here: [URL]http://tinyurl.com/yuly87[/URL] or [URL]http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/9/sa_flashplayer_9_all_debug_ub.dmg[/URL] You can download the ruby script and a swf file from here: [URL]http://www.asserttrue.com/files/Published.zip[/URL] (I have also included the latest script below) The behavior that I'm getting is as follows: a) If I use the recommended OS X 'open -a' command against the "Flash Player.app" folder/executable, the Flash Player opens, takes focus and displays the SWF file perfectly, but I lose all references to the spawned process in ruby. So I can't tell when it closes or force it to close when I want it to. b) If I use sh, exec, system or popen, I cannot target the .app folder but instead must point at "Flash Player.app/Content/MacOS/standalone". This approach will launch the Flash Player and keep a handle to it in ruby so that the processes are perfectly tied, but I can't seem to send in the target to the SWF file. I'm pretty sure there is a simple fix to this problem, but I can't seem to find it anywhere. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Luke Bayes lbayes [at] p a t t e r n p a r k [dot] com [URL="http://www.asunit.org"]www.asunit.org[/URL] File: flash_player.rb ----------------8<------------------ class FlashPlayer def initialize # This will launch the Player with the swf # but I cannot hold onto the process because # 'open' seems to fork and I'm not sure how # to grab the forked process id... execute_with_open # This will launch the player and hold onto # the process, but I can't get it to accept # the requisite swf file #execute_without_open end def execute_with_open player = "Flash\ Player.app" swf = "Published.swf" IO.popen("open -a '#{player}' #{swf}") do |p| puts 'Player opened' end puts 'Player thread returned' end def execute_without_open player = "Flash\ Player.app/Contents/MacOS/standalone" swf = "Published.swf" t = Thread.new { IO.popen("'#{player}' #{swf}") do |p| puts 'Player opened - but not focused?' end } while(t.alive?) sleep(0.3) puts 'Player still open' end puts 'Player closed' end end FlashPlayer.new ---------------->8------------------ [/QUOTE]

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