Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!rochester!udel!gatech!ukma!psuvm.bitnet!cunyvm!unknown
From: rrk@byuvax.bitnet
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: How to get a child process to tell its parent that it died
Message-ID: <59rrk@byuvax.bitnet>
Date: 20 Jan 88 04:23:40 GMT
Lines: 9

There are many solutions.  The easiest is to use lib$spawn (a RTL procedure)
which automatically sets up a termination mailbox and allows an ast or about
anything else you may wish to happen when the spawned process dies.  You
may find this undesireable since you are used to using "C" in a unix
environment.  I am not sure exactly how the "pipes" you speak of work under
"C", but if your forked process dies after the current image, you could
use the system service sys$dclexh to declare a user-mode exit handler which
would be called under most circumstances of image exit and could send an
obituary down the pipe.