in reply to Best way to ensure process is live

I have a few, lets say 4, "sub" processes listening on an IP socket for work. Since there is always the chance one will crash, what is the best way to tell if they are live?

Assuming you spawned the subprocesses via fork() (and remembered their pids), then have the parent process wait(). When one of the subprocesses dies dies, wait() will return the dead process's pid to the parent, who can spawn a new subprocess.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom