Unix subprocess manager for Erlang

subproc is a unix subprocess manager for Erlang. It works much closer with operating systems than Erlang, so over built-in ports it provides several advantages:

• tracks subprocess' PID
• can spawn a subprocess in a process group
• can send a signal to a subprocess or its process group
• subprocess' STDIO can be redirected with pipe(2) or socketpair(2)
• spawned port can work in {active,once} and passive modes known from gen_tcp and other socket modules, which provides a sensible backpressure to external command (running yes(1) won't trigger OOM killer)

subproc can also spawn ports from already-opened descriptors, which is mainly intended for reading from STDIN with backpressure.

Documentation

subproc is documented using EDoc. A local copy is generated with make doc command to ./doc/ directory. An already generated online copy is available at http://dozzie.jarowit.net/api/erlang-subproc/.

Prior art

erlexec application is somewhat similar, though it has different goals. It allows to treat OS processes as Erlang processes, including setting links and monitors. subproc, on the other hand, focuses on handling processes in a manner similar to network sockets, and unix-specific features (pipe()/socketpair(), process groups, signals), although important, are auxiliary.

Contact and license

subproc library is written by Stanislaw Klekot . The primary distribution point is http://dozzie.jarowit.net/.

subproc library is distributed under 3-clause BSD license. See COPYING file for details.