Just a couple of things I need to know about processes:
1 - is there a way to test if a particular process is still running?
(assuming you've got its PID, of course)
2 - is there a way to make a process wait until all of its child processes have finished running?
3 - is there a way to kill all child processes (of the current process) at once?
Thanks in advance (even if all three answers turn out to be "no", which would be less than helpful...)
This might help http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node22.htmlOriginally Posted by DavidG
About question 3 answer is no, you will have an orphaned process running
This also may help http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/CSILUnix/runaways.html
Last edited by Maragato; 05-10-2006 at 08:18 AM.
It might help if we knew which OS you were talking about.
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
Question 3 is possible. Just keep track of child PIDs as they're created and when you want to kill the child processes you can call kill(pid, SIGKILL) (or some other appropriate signal).
This is of course assuming your environment has the kill() function. Like Salem pointed out, this is implementation-specific.
If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.
It's Unix. (Cygwin, really, but since that's designed to act like Unix...)
Thanks for the help with question 3. I'm keeping all the child PIDs in a linked list, so that'd be relatively easy. (The linked list is why I asked question 1, in fact.)
---EDIT---
OK, I've found a way to handle question 1 with the kill() system call - that just leaves question 2.
Last edited by DavidG; 05-11-2006 at 07:37 AM.
For question 2, use the waitpid() function for each PID in your child PID list.
If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.
