I have a program which starts a number of child processes via fork(). Each child process does the exact same type of work, but a different data set.
From time to time a process may hang or I may just want to investigate a particular one. The problem is that each one is named "/usr/bin/perl -w <blah>" in a ps listing.
I would like some suggestions on methods to differentiate each of the programs and what they are working on.
I have considered using a file or shared memory, having the child write it's information and authoring a utility to read this data, but I would like to get some community input on alternate methods I may have overlooked.
TIA,
Chad.