You could make another child whose job is only to wait on the parent's death and then kill the first child. jettero's suggestion of a lock file would be a good way for the watchdog child to notice the parent's death without polling. The whole process would look a little like:

  1. Parent flocks a file.
  2. Parent forks child 1 (records PID—child 2 will need it).
  3. Parent forks child 2.
  4. Child 2 does a blocking flock on the same file (and so hangs).
  5. There is joy in Mudville.
  6. Parent receives deadly signal 9. Parent's lock is released.
  7. Child 2 gets the lock and continues. It's next (unconditional) action is to kill child 1 and exit.
  8. Child 1 dies from the signal from child 2.
  9. And then there were none.

In reply to Re: Child process dies by kyle
in thread Child process dies by dejans

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.