You could

• setup a communication pipe between the two processes and use a non-blocking select to determine if information is there to be read...
• or use SIGHUP, regardless of what anyone thinks it's reserved for...
• do the kill/respawn thing, but I think that's going to be widely regarded as an ugly option
• I think a fork per sleep cycle is even worse than the above option.
• Do the single process thing, with a non-blocking select to determine if there is input to read

Personally, I believe the first or last options are the better options...

-Scott