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From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: help determining child process status
Message-ID: <1849@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 28 Jun 89 17:39:58 GMT
References: <1854@leah.Albany.Edu> <123@avatar.UUCP>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 10


 >If you know the pids of the sub-tasks, you can do a kill(pid, 0). Under
 >Xenix, kill(pid, 0) returns 0 (zero) if the task is still running or 
 >-1 if the task is terminated. I have tried this under Xenix and it works.
 >However, I know that it is not very portable to other flavors of Unix.

Uhh, it works under 4.[23]BSD and systems derived therefrom, and System
V Release N for values of N greater than some M (M is at least 2, as I
remember) and systems derived therefrom, so it's more portable than you
might think.