I'm trying to create a simple daemon process, ie, fork, exit the parent, and have the child inherited by the system to do its stuff.

I've tried this with the following code but running under cron doesn't seem to behave - I want it under cron to make make sure it restarts every hour in case it ever falls over. 
my $pid = fork;

if ( ! defined $pid )
{
    # fork failed
    
    throw_invalid "Couldn't fork";
}
elsif ( $pid > 0 )
{
    # parent

    exit;
}
else
{
    while ( 1 ) { sleep 1; # and do other snazzy stuff forever }
}

[download]
$ ps -ef 

rbrown   29884  3162  0 11:58 ?        00:00:00 crond
rbrown   29885 29884  2 11:58 ?        00:00:03 solr-job-queue- <defunct>
rbrown   29886     1  2 11:58 ?        00:00:02 /usr/bin/perl -w /home/me/solr-job-queue-process.pl
Is it all because the parent can't die until it's child has, and that's why cron isn't clearing it from the process table?

Surely there's a way round this?

Any guidance greatly appreciated.

In reply to daemon/fork: defunct parent not going away nicely by Cagao

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