A lua library to spawn programs

Status

Features

• High level functions for common cases
• Bindings to the full posix_spawn family of functions
• Compatible with Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and LuaJIT

Currently only works on POSIXy systems, but the high level module should be portable to Windows; someone just needs to put the work in.

Installation

It's recommended to install lua-spawn by using luarocks. This will automatically install run-time lua dependencies for you.

$ luarocks install spawn

Rationale

Spawning a new child program from a lua script is surprisingly hard.

Existing solutions:

• os.execute doesn't allow interaction with any file descriptors
• io.popen only allows interaction with one of stdin or stdout
• fork + exec isn't portable to non-MMU or non-unix architectures

This project uses the posix_spawn family of functions.