Keeping an eye on hung system calls..

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 11:54:19AM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> On 06/06/06, Toby Corkindale <tjc at wintrmute.net> wrote:
> >Both methods are kind of ugly though.. The system() call is expensive 
> >enough as
> >it is (including it's own fork&exec), and I'd still need to find a 
> >mechanism to
> >make sure I can kill the system-child of the worker fork-or-thread, as 
> >well as
> >just the worker.
> 
> You could use Killfam to ensure a process and all it's children are
> sent the kill signal.

That's what process groups are for in Unix.  Send the signal to a
negative PID to kill that process and all its children.  You do have to
ensure that you start the new process in a group, however.  Have a nose
around in "perldoc POSIX".

-Dom