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From: dkeisen@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU (Dave Eisen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Killing a background process from a C program
Message-ID: <1990Jul19.201116.13696@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 19 Jul 90 20:11:16 GMT
References: <1990Jul19.151728.17448@ncs.dnd.ca>
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In article <1990Jul19.151728.17448@ncs.dnd.ca> marwood@ncs.dnd.ca (Gordon Marwood) writes:
>
>What I would like to do is start a background process at one point in the
>C program, and at a later time kill it.  Currently I am invoking the
>background process with system("background_process &");, but none of the
>texts that I have available help me to proceed any further.
>

System is not a powerful enough tool for this, it is designed for only
the simplest of process control situations. You'll have to fork and
exec the new process yourself. Fork will create a new process and return
the pid of that process, at some later point use kill (pid, signal_number)
to kill it. For more details, drop me a note or (better still) pick up
a copy of Marc Rochkind's Advanced Unix Programming. (BTW -- even though
it is a UNIX book and not a C book, I think it should be mentioned
in the Frequently Asked Questions posting as an excellent reference for
C programming under UNIX.)

Followups redirected to comp.unix.questions.



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Dave Eisen                      	    Home: (415) 323-9757
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