BTW they might be using resource limits (man getrlimit or ulimit) to kill the process. That may be smart enough to go across children.

hmm...  man getrlimit says:

 Limits on the consumption of system resources by the current process 
+and
     each process it creates may be obtained with the getrlimit() call
+, and
     set with the setrlimit() call.
[download]

sounds like child processes will get nuked as well. ( i know the ISP's using FreeBSD, and so am i. man page straight outta FreeBSD 4.2 ).

this is exactly the kind of stuff i'm worried about

i can't get in an change the frequency of the crontab, or anything remotely useful. ( ISP requires a cron.sh file - which contains jobnames -- , and THEY control the crontab )

so forking won't really be an option . . .

i need to do more research on how the ISP is doing the resource limiting, i guess. I was hoping for a quick way out of the problem.

BTW -- i'm not talking long limits. the script gets killed in a matter of minutes. single digit minutes.