How to start a background process in Python?

Question

I\'m trying to port a shell script to the much more readable python version. The original shell script starts several processes (utilities, monitors, etc.) in the background

Answer 1

You probably want to start investigating the os module for forking different threads (by opening an interactive session and issuing help(os)). The relevant functions are fork and any of the exec ones. To give you an idea on how to start, put something like this in a function that performs the fork (the function needs to take a list or tuple 'args' as an argument that contains the program's name and its parameters; you may also want to define stdin, out and err for the new thread):

try:
    pid = os.fork()
except OSError, e:
    ## some debug output
    sys.exit(1)
if pid == 0:
    ## eventually use os.putenv(..) to set environment variables
    ## os.execv strips of args[0] for the arguments
    os.execv(args[0], args)