Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!yarra!bohra!als
From: als@bohra.cpg.oz (Anthony Shipman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How do you handle while(1) fork(); ?
Summary: set up a barrier
Message-ID: <416@bohra.cpg.oz>
Date: 17 Jul 90 09:37:35 GMT
References: <841@massey.ac.nz> <1990Jul11.115612.2155@aucs.uucp> <4261@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>
Organization: Computer Power Group, Melb, Australia
Lines: 25

In article <4261@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>, rhys@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Rhys Weatherley) writes:
> I would also be interested in a summary, but how about this one:
> 
> 	while (!fork ())
> 	  {
> 	    /* some non-important code */
> 	  }
> 	/* some "clean-up" code */
> 	exit (0);
> 
> This will create a round-robin of processes, where each process spawns
> a child, and then dies (fork() returns 0 in the child process).  Extremely 
> difficult to kill these ones, because by the time you have a process-id 
> to kill, that process doesn't exist usually anymore!  This is an 

I had this problem once. I used a little program that did a kill -9 on a pid
that was ahead of the pid sequence from the runaway program. The kill -9 was
put into an infinite loop. There was a good chance that the kill would get the
process when its pid got big enough. (There was also some chance that an
innocent process would be killed, but not much).
-- 
Anthony Shipman                               ACSnet: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au
Computer Power Group
9th Flr, 616 St. Kilda Rd.,
St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia
D