I use ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20) [i386-mingw32] on Windows7

To do mySQL backup I run runas /savecred /user:yogurt\administrator "cmd.exe /k mysqldump --user=#{dbuser} --password=#{dbpassword} #{dbname} > #{dump}" - mysqldump must be executed as administrator. I do not run my ruby scripts under administrator account.

runas starts new cmd.exe and ruby doesn't wait for it to finish. Dump process takes about one minute to finish. After that I zip the dump file and delete it.

But I have to make sure that the dump process already finished before I do any other action on that file. Right now I use sleep(60) that works but I wonder if there any better more systematic solution.