I recently had to do something similar, and stumbled into a rats nest of problems revolving around SIGSTOP, and process groups.

In my scenario, I had a perl script starting up and managing a unix process on a Sun workstation. Anytime I hit ctl-z at my shell prompt (the shell that started the perl script), both the perl script and the background unix process stopped. This is not what I wanted at all.

After much gnashing of teeth and tearing out hair (I should have asked here), I finally figured out that the SIGSTOP was being sent to everyone in my process group. To solve the problem, I needed to create the unix process in its own process group. This is how I learned about the wonders of the perl "setpgrp" command, and process groups in general.

So here is my code: 

# Fork a unix process...
my $pid;
if($pid = fork) {
    print STDERR "parent pid=$$ child pid=$pid\n";
}elsif (defined $pid) {
    print STDERR "child pid=$$ pid=$pid\n";
    # Must do setpgrp as child for nohup and job control stuff...
    setpgrp(0, $$);
    exec $unixcmd || die "Bad exec $!";
}
kill 'INT', $pid;

[download]
Hope that helps.

-Craig

UPDATE:

oha opened my mind, by letting me know that the setpgrp could be done from either the parent or the child process. oha++ Thanks!

In reply to Re: start and kill a process in a local shell by cmv
in thread start and kill a process in a local shell by danmcb

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.