in reply to Monitoring child processes

perlipc has quite some material on handling child processes; in particular it points out that you should call waitpid for the dying child processes, so that they don't become zombies/defunct. Calling waitpid is probably more idiomatic than polling all your children.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

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Re^2: Monitoring child processes
by rovf (Priest) on Mar 13, 2012 at 15:49 UTC
    I had thought about waitpid with NO_WAIT (I have used a similar solution in a different application), but I was interested in get it to run by using kill 0. Actually, this seems to work so far, only that I didn't understand, why I had to 'IGNORE' SIGCHLD explicitly. Actually, I got the idea to use kill instead of waitpid from an example at perlipc:
    Another interesting signal to send is signal number zero. This doesn't actually affect a child process, but instead checks whether it's alive or has changed its UID. 
        unless (kill 0 => $kid_pid) {
        warn "something wicked happened to $kid_pid";
    }

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    This seemed to be an attractive and easy solution - that's why I wanted to try it out.

    -- 
    Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>
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