how to do things while waiting?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: how to do things while waiting? by LD2 (Curate) on May 16, 2001 at 06:09 UTC
As always... a good start here is to check out Super Search. You may want to check out tilly's Run Commands in parallel or just check out a few other suggestions at fork n wait.	[reply]
Re (tilly) 1: how to do things while waiting? by tilly (Archbishop) on May 16, 2001 at 15:59 UTC
Look up waitpid. Alternately you might want to try: `$SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE';` [download] and not worry about your kids. (On most Unix platforms I believe this will cause them to be auto-reaped without using Perl's unreliable signals.)	[reply] [d/l]
(tye)Re: how to do things while waiting? by tye (Sage) on May 17, 2001 at 02:36 UTC
No, that only works on SVR4-based versions of Unix and not on BSD-based versions of Unix. (Now that Sun has converted to SVR4-based, you might be able to argue "most" is appropriate, but I won't.) - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]
Re (tilly) 3: how to do things while waiting? by tilly (Archbishop) on May 17, 2001 at 02:56 UTC
Quoting from perlipc for version 5.005_03: `On most UNIX platforms, the CHLD (sometimes also known as CLD) signal has special behavior with respect to a value of 'IGNORE'. Setting $SIG{CHLD} to 'IGNORE' on such a platform has the effect of not creating zombie processes when the parent process fails to wait() on its child processes (i.e. child processes are automatically reaped). Calling wait() with $SIG{CHLD} set to 'IGNORE' usually returns -1 on such platforms.` [download] So if you don't like my wording, you should check whether it is still needed and then send in a documentation patch.	[reply] [d/l]