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Now I admit that I'm locking myself into a unix environment,

Unless you are making an application for users to install, I don't see how this will be problem. Effectively, the only significant OS you are locking yourself out of is Windows and Unix you can get for free and install anywhere.

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I developed a Ruby application a few years ago with a similar structure on OS X to be deployed on Ubuntu servers. All the forking and child process signaling worked like a charm in both OS's.

So yeah... you're locking yourself out of Windows. Consider it a smart move :)

Note that you can get UNIX functionality on Windows using (1) Cygwin and (2) Microsoft's own UNIX Services for Windows.

I'm not sure how compatible these two are with, say, Linux or OS X, but they ought to give you a starting point.

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