Well, you supplied a great explanation (particularly in combination with the geeksalad article) -- I now know just enough to be dangerous. :^P

Let me see if I understood what was written and can apply it to the problem at hand...

We need one application/process/thread ('a') to instantiate/launch/spawn another ('b') that will perform function 'x' while 'a' waits for keyboard input...

Under Unix/Perl, this would be an exec situation as we don't need 'a' to clone itself, but we *do* need it to launch 'b' as a distinct process.

Now there are two possibilities, depending on whether or not 'a' and 'b' need to communicate after the exec().

If they do not -- i.e. that 'b' will run until it has done 'x' and then exit.

But if 'a' and 'b' still need a way to communicate, then we need to avoid trampling all over the shared information (a 'race condition'). One way of avoiding this is supplied by tilly as SimpleLock, and I think that this LockFile-Simple might also allow the processes to pass information back and forth.

Am I on the right track?

In reply to RE: Threads vs forking by jreades
in thread When is a while not a while? by Miker

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