I've got a service dispatch script that runs and spawns off children at an alarming rate. So the zombie hordes are terrifying. I'm trying to decide between grabbing sig_chld and waiting and 'double fork'.

For the sake of background; the current code uses fork and system (rather than exec), because:

• the launch script in the child process needs to play with the return code.
• the top-level dispatch loop doesn't care one whit about the child processes; fire and forget.

That's all fine. But in my exhuberance to fire and forget, I've ended up doing rather a lot of forgetting.

Is there a reason to double-fork over setting sig_chld handler to a simple wait?

Is the latter more stable? Less blockilicious (or more?)

- V

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.