Glad to know it's fixed.

As I think about it a little, though, sending yourself a SIGTERM is a bit redundant, you could of course just 'die' or 'exit' in the SIGALRM handler.

Also...you're calling 'waitpid' in the child (which is odd) after a call to exit (which is odder).

The other way of doing this, of course, is to get the parent to periodically wake up (you can do this with waitpid and a sleep) and calculate if it should kill off a child (just store each pid's start time and kill off the old ones, maybe keeping them in a sorted list of age or something).

One case where you might need to have the parent do it is if your long-running code calls out to some XS code which doesn't return up to perl when it receives a signal.

Since perl 5.8, perl uses 'safe signals' by default, which means that your signal handlers only fire when control returns to the perl interpreter. This can be a long time (or never) when you call out of perl into C/XS code. (Safe signals are 'better', but you sometimes need to be aware of this issue when doing signal handling in perl).

In reply to Re^3: Killing Forks by jbert
in thread Killing Forks by Earindil

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