A ruby background work with a monitoring thread to kill the worker after a timeout

worker.rb

class WorkerThread
	def initialize

	end

	def start(options = nil)
		raise 'background_task needs a block' unless block_given?

		options ||= {}

		worker = Thread.new do
			begin
				yield
			rescue => e
				File.append 'error.log', "#{Time.now.iso8601}\t#{e.class.to_s}\t#{e.message}\n"
				raise e
			end
		end

		# if the user set a timeout then we need a thread to monitor
		# the worker to make sure it doesn't run too long
		if !options[:timeout].nil?
			Thread.new do
				sleep options[:timeout].to_f
				
				if worker.status != false
					worker.kill 
					File.append 'error.log', "#{Time.now.iso8601}\tbackground_task thread timeout\n"
				end
			end
		end

		worker
	end
end

class File
	def self.append(path, data)
		File.open(path, 'a:UTF-8') do |file| 
			file.write data 
		end
	end
end