[gtrubetskoy]

exec.Command() is a more elegant approach, I've written about this back in June, my write-up was specific to an HTTP server: http://grisha.org/blog/2014/06/03/graceful-restart-in-golang...

I think the article also misses an important step - you need to let the new process to initialize itself (e.g. read its config files, connect to db, etc), and then signal the parent that it is ready to accept connections, only at which point the parent stops accepting. The important point here is that the child may fail to init, in which case the parent should carry on as if nothing happened.