Probably a simple question, but humor me: Let''s say I have a page (in Rails) that lets a user type a shell command (say, ''ping blah.com'') into a form and it fires off a worker that then updates that page using AJAX (all of this is working so far). How would I correctly wrap the worker in a begin..rescue so that it spits out ''invalid command'' when someone types in something incorrect. Right now, I have: def start_working begin @result = IO.popen(@cmd) rescue SystemCallError @result = "Invalid or Failed Command: " + $! end end but in my view, the @result doesn''t seem to be accessible to the ajax periodical updater in the same way the @result from the popen is... what am i missing? [mp]