Returning data from forked processes

Question

If I do

Process.fork do 
  x 
end 

how can I know what x returned (e.g. true/fase/string) ?

(Writing to a file/database is not an option...)

Answer 1

Thanks for all the answers, I got my solution up and running, still need to see how to handle non-forking environments, but for now it works :)

read, write = IO.pipe
Process.fork do
  write.puts "test"
end
Process.fork do
  write.puts 'test 2'
end

Process.wait
Process.wait

write.close
puts read.read
read.close

you can see it in action @ parallel_specs Rails plugin