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Message: [QUOTE="Paul Stickney, post: 4553953"] You can do something like... Fork. In the child, detach and exec (some people call for a double-fork). In the server, store the PID of the child to a file (if needed). To find out of the process is alive, send signal 0 to the saved ID. [There isn't really a signal 0 but trying to send on will let you know if a process with that ID is alive.] This works fine on systems that support `fork' and signals nicely so, not windows. You might be able to glean more interesting tidbits from Proc::Daemon on CPAN (yes, it's Perl). There are likely similar libraries for Ruby but I haven't looked (try RAA/rubyforge as usual...) Paul [/QUOTE]