Reading a file N lines at a time in ruby

Question

I have a large file (hundreds of megs) that consists of filenames, one per line.

I need to loop through the list of filenames, and fork off a process for each filename. I want a maximum of 8 forked processes at a time and I don't want to read the whole filename list into RAM at once.

I'm not even sure where to begin, can anyone help me out?

Answer 1

File.foreach("large_file").each_slice(8) do |eight_lines|
  # eight_lines is an array containing 8 lines.
  # at this point you can iterate over these filenames
  # and spawn off your processes/threads
end