Relaunching program with tweaked arguments

["Soni L." <fakedme@...>]

I'm trying to build a multiprocess program in Lua. Are there any 
libraries for launching subprocesses and polling their status?
It needs to work on Windows and POSIX, accept a table of unescaped 
arguments (with spaces and quotes and so on), and support polling (i.e. 
nonblocking status check).
I'm not too worried about things like environment variables and stuff. I 
could use them to pass the manager's socket ID but I can also just use 
tweaked arguments for those.
I'm using Lua 5.1.

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