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From: mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Michael Khaw)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: faster way to "ps lct" (bsd4.x) from C?
Message-ID: <11634@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 9-Apr-87 00:36:31 EST
Article-I.D.: teknowle.11634
Posted: Thu Apr  9 00:36:31 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Apr-87 04:02:50 EST
Distribution: na
Organization: Teknowledge, Inc., Palo Alto CA
Lines: 31
Keywords: ps emacs pid ppid job control
Xref: mnetor comp.emacs:838 comp.unix.questions:1870 comp.unix.wizards:1884

Because we have a lot of users who are accustomed to a local TOPS-20 version
of Emacs that uses C-x C-z to exit emacs, many of them tend to leave lots of
^Z suspended gnu emacs on our Ultrix 1.2 VAX when they really mean to exit
with C-x C-c.

So, I want to modify emacs so it checks to see if its parent process has any
other children that are emacs and tell the user about them.  Just checking if
the controlling terminal has other emacses is probably too obnoxious since we
want to be nice if the user, for example, intentionally suspends emacs from the
login shell and starts an emacs from mail.

The only way I've found to do the trick is to popen("/bin/ps lct", "r"), and
look for any process named "emacs" whose pid is not mine and whose ppid matches
my ppid.  However, on a busy system with many processes this takes several
seconds, making emacs noticeably slower (than it already is) to fire up.

I figure there must be a way to read /dev/kmem (?) directly to find out if
my parent has any children who are emacs processes -- but I haven't found
any place in the manuals that provide enough detail.  The man page for nlist(3)
and /usr/include/{a.out,nlist,stab}.h are wonderfully vague about just what
I ought to pass as "nl" in nlist("/dev/kmem", nl), if in fact that would get
me the information I need.

Do I need to point out that we don't have source code? :(

Thanks in advance,
Mike Khaw
-- 
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