After you fork off the children is the parent using stuff like system/backticks/qx/etc? I've seen cases in the past where my SIGCHLD reaped the child of a system() call (and I wouldn't be surprised if system() on some machines could reap a child I forked as well). These resulted in the '-1' being returned.

Since I'm paranoid about signal handlers and I tend to have code where the parent just hangs around waiting for the children, I don't usually install SIGCHLD, but just loop with waitpid/sleep on the PIDs I care about. If you don't have this luxury, try changing your waitpid to just wait for the pid's you care about.

In reply to Re: $? is -1??? by bluto
in thread $? is -1??? by kscaldef

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