kill system call (was: Re: Buggy UUCP)

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <8349 at bigtex.uucp> james at bigtex.UUCP (James Van Artsdalen) writes:
>Older UUCPs did not use the (relatively new) capability of kill to
>detect the existence of a process, and hence simply assumed that a
>lock was "stale" if it was old enough.  "Old enough" often meant an
>hour or two.  This scheme doesn't [ work ] terribly well.

the kill (PID, 0) idiom has been in unix since 7th Edition days, at
least.  it is common to both BSD and USG unixii, so it can be used
without worrying about portablity.

uuclean should still be set to remove LCK.. files that are more than
a few hours old so that LCK..<system> files will be deleted if they
are abandoned.  [ LCK..<device> files will be removed by uucico if
need be ]
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