Alright, design question here. I've read up on security and whatnot for CGI scriting. The realization that CGI is hard has lead me to be wary of performing certain kinds of things with CGI scripting without asking the gurus first. Especially since I'm not messing with my own server, or even my own account on somebody elses server.

The situation: A CGI script makes little files with little bits of configuration information in them. The script can latter be invoked with this configuration info, through a proper request method. After a certain period of time the files expire and are deleted. The current system has every nth user get caught with the performance hit of doing a scan and delete of these config files.

The question: would it be legit (safe, reasonable, etc) to have every nth user fork a seperate process to do this sort of scanning, and have the parent go on without waiting for the child. I haven't worked alot with multiple processes, so it'd be helpful to hear what sort of considerations this kind of design must take.

Cheers,
Erik

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

In reply to CGI scripting and multiple processes by erikharrison

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