What I need is for a parent process to create a child that is not merely a copy of the parent. I have a parent process that will have a lot of overhead and the child needs to be free of that overhead. Also, I need the parent to wait until the child is done before exiting the script.

The code I have does not wait. My assumption is that getting the parent of 1 means that I am getting a child without the overhead of the parent.

Code is Below 

# Fork the process as its own parent. I am assuming by 
# recieving a parent of 1 that the Child is not just a copy
# of the parent. 


unless (fork)
 {
  # Create first child
  unless (fork)
   {
    # Create Second Child
    sleep 1 until getppid == 1;
    # Execute our command 
    exec "distill mypsfile.ps";
    exit 0;
   }

  exit 0;
 }

 # Wait for the first child to be reaped 
 # How can we make this wait until the exec statement 
 # has completed before exiting ?????????
 wait;

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edit (broquaint): changed <pre> <code> tags

In reply to Creating Child without overhead of Parent by cxbast

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