I've written a program specifically to keep batches of X processes running concurrently. My company uses this program to automate long-running tasks and keep our servers running as many at a time as possible without overrunning the system. To do this, my perl script periodically checks the status of its child processes (kicked off with a call to open()) using the waitpid() function. This works like a charm in the Linux world but doesn't perform as expected in the Windows world. The code I think is the problem is the following: 
sub check_for_completed_processes
{
   my @completed;
   my @temp;
 #  print "Checking for completed procs...\n";
   while(my $running = pop @running)
   {
      if(waitpid($running -> {process_id} ,&WNOHANG))
      {
         $running -> {end_time} = timestamp();
       #  print "Finished. \n";
         push @completed, $running;
         print "Process completed: " . $running -> {process} . "\n";
         print "Started at: " . $running -> {start_time} . "\n";
         print "End time: " . $running -> {end_time} . "\n";
      }
      else
      {
         push @temp, $running;
      }
   }
   @running = @temp;
   return @completed;                                                 
+                              
}

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This is being run on Windows Server 2003. Is there a way in the Windows world to do a non-blocking waitpid() call or equivalent?

In reply to waitpid and Windows by jeffthewookiee

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