I played around with ChatGPT today and got it to generate me a Perl script that forks children and restarts any that failed. Here's my initial prompt:

Write a Perl program that forks 5 child processes. The main process
should handle SIGCHILD and restart any child processes that have exite
+d.
The child processes have a function called "doWork" that have a 
"Your code here" comment.
[download]

There was a bit back-and-forth to fix some bugs and to get ChatGPT to "use English". On the plus side, ChatGPT used "use strict; use warnings;" right from the start AND used readable indenting as well(*). Here's what it came up with:

Edit: Copied an old version at first, this is now the latest version

use strict;
use warnings;
use English qw( -no_match_vars );
use POSIX qw( :sys_wait_h );

# Fork 5 child processes
my $num_processes = 5;
for (my $i = 0; $i < $num_processes; $i++) {
    my $pid = fork();
    if ($pid == 0) {
        # Child process
        doWork();
        exit;
    } elsif (!defined $pid) {
        die "Failed to fork: $OS_ERROR";
    }
}

# Handle SIGCHILD and restart any child processes that have exited
$SIG{CHLD} = sub {
    while ((my $pid = waitpid(-1, WNOHANG())) > 0) {
        my $exit_code = $CHILD_ERROR >> 8;
        if ($exit_code == 0) {
            print "Child process $pid exited successfully\n";
        } else {
            print "Child process $pid exited with code $exit_code, res
+tarting\n";
            my $new_pid = fork();
            if ($new_pid == 0) {
                # Child process
                doWork();
                exit;
            } elsif (!defined $new_pid) {
                die "Failed to fork: $OS_ERROR";
            }
        }
    }
};

# Main process waits for child processes to exit
while (1) {
    sleep(1);
}

# Function for child processes to do work
sub doWork {
    # Your code here
    print "Child process $$ doing some work\n";
    sleep(10);
}
[download]

It's not perfect. The program doesn't exit when all children have finished and i would probably have to prompt it to add that functionality. But overall, i'd say it looks like a reasonable base framework.

What do you think? Any other problems i didn't catch?

(*) Any chance we could use whatever OpenAI used to train ChatGPT to train our newbies here on how to format code?

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