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From: vrm@cathedral.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu (Vasile R. Montan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Catching termination of child process and system() call
Keywords: fork wait system
Message-ID: <1223@babcock.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu>
Date: 21 Jan 91 19:18:03 GMT
Sender: news@cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu
Followup-To: poster
Lines: 27


   I have a program which occasionally forks to do some processing.
In order to avoid having zombie process hang around, I put the
following in my main routine:

void dowait()
{
  wait(0);
}

main()
{
   ...
   signal(SIGCHLD, dowait);
   ...
}

   However, in another place in the code, I do a system call and look
at the return status to see if an error has occurred.  Without the
signal in the main routine, the system call works fine, but with the
signal, the system call always returns a -1.  Is there an easy way
to fix this?

**************** The above opinions are mine, all mine. *****************
Vasile R. Montan                           Bell Atlantic Software Systems 
                                           9 South High Street             
vrm@cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu                     Morgantown, WV 26505