fork question

[debiandude]

Im writing a timer program. However I need to know if my child finishes exiting and quits. Is there a signal I could listen to that tells me the process has quit?

[Stuka]

In the parent process, you use waitpid() - the man page will tell you more, but that's what (literally) waits for the child process to exit.

[l01yuk]

SIGCHLD is what you are looking for. It is sent by the child to the parent on _exit().

[debiandude]

Thanks, SIGCHLD was exactly it. Grazie!

[bwkaz]

Well, all that wait() and waitpid() do is just block until the process receives a SIGCHLD.

Just FYI.

[Stuka]

Well, glad to know I'm not a complete idiot! (Actually, I KNEW I was right, since I just wrote a short piece of code using waitpid() for my class last night!).

[debiandude]

See but I couldn't just call waitpid becuase I wouldn't be able to execute other things in the mean time. What I did was set up a signal cather to SIGCHLD and interupt what ever Im doing.

[Stuka]

Well, NOW you tell me!

[debiandude]

I know I know. I have this bad habit of assuming that everyone know whats going on in my head. Funny thing is half the time I don't even know whats going on up there ;-)