Try this instead (untested)

use strict;  # I'm hinting that this should be part of the (error chec
+king you took out)

my @pids;

while (1) {
    # Loop other processing here.
    push(@pids,load_file($this_file));
}

reap_children(@pids);

sub load_file() {
    my $childProcess;

    $childProcess = fork();

    unless($childProcess) {
        # Child process so lets exec the loader.
        exec("loader $this_file");
        exit 0;
    }
    return $childProcess;
}

sub reap_children() {
    foreach(@_) {
        wait($_);
    }
}
[download]

HTH

Update: I should post before being caffeinated...the waitpid shouldn't block as tye pointed out to me. So, I'm not quite sure where it's going wrong....maybe a solaris issue? I've used the above technique before and not had any problems...

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"

Thanks for the response maverick. I know waitpid shouldn't block which was why I included my OS and Perl build details. As for use strict, yes it and 1000 other lines were removed.

For the proper way to reap children, consult perlman:perlipc. The section on "Signals" is near the top of the document, and describes how to set up a SIGCHLD handler to correctly account for the death of a child process.

If you don't handle SIGCHLD correctly, you could be getting blocked on wait().

Actually, using a signal handler to reap children is problematic in Perl because Perl signal handlers aren't 100% reliable. Each time one is trigger, you have something like a 2% chance of corrupting Perl's internal structures. I think this may be fixed in a an upcoming version of Perl.

The safest way to reap children is shown under "perldoc -f waitpid" and closely matches the code in question. Perhaps Solaris doesn't define WNOHANG as 1? That seems unlikely, but that is all I've come up with so far.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

Thanks for looking at it tye. I hoped it might have been something to do with my Perl version. I'm stuck.

Now, why does your process appear to wait for some children to die? Well, one possibility is that you have exceeded the maximum number of children your OS allows. That is, if you have a lot of files to process, you may have forked as many children as you are allowed to fork. To figure that out you can keep track of the number of live children and see if that number gets big. The limit on my system is 511.

BTW you can avoid the magic numbers in waitpid if you use POSIX "sys_wait_h";.

HTH, --traveler

Update: I'd never heard about the 2% chance of corruption. I've always followed the Camel's advice about using the signal handler, I guess I've been lucky. Maybe one choice is to do a periodic wait for children using code similar to reap_children. You might also try setting $SIG{CHLD} to SIG_IGN.

Note that $SIG{CHLD}= sub {wait}; has another problem. If two children exit at nearly the same time, the two SIGCHLD signals can arrive close enough together that the signal handler only gets called once. Each time this happens, you'd get one more zombie hanging around.

Back to the original problem, I'd add some debug print statements so that you can figure out exactly where the process is hanging.

Also, $SIG{CHLD}= 'IGNORE'; only works on some operating systems (SysV-based ones, as I recall).

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

You are correct that the wait should be in a loop such as the reap_children function has. I was clearly not thinking clearly... Also, on SYS V systems IIRC CHLD or CLD signals are regenerated if you do not do wait on the clild so the race condidion you mention may not hold true there and wait by itself should work. I suppose I've been using SYS V-based systems too much to think of some of these issues. My bad.

tye is correct. To be portable you'll need to find another solution. I have used non-blocking waits in a timer loop to clean up children and that may work here. Of course, if you don't care about portability, use what works on your system and document that it isn't portable.

use POSIX qw(:sys_wait_h);

sub REAPER {
   while ((my $pid = waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)) > 0) {
        # do something with $pid;
   }
    $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;
}

$SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;
[download]

sub fork_bomb {
   while (1){
      fork_a_kid();
   }
}
[download]