How do you handle while(1) fork(); ?

[Anthony Shipman]

In article <4261 at uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>, rhys at batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Rhys Weatherley) writes:
> I would also be interested in a summary, but how about this one:
> 
> 	while (!fork ())
> 	  {
> 	    /* some non-important code */
> 	  }
> 	/* some "clean-up" code */
> 	exit (0);
> 
> This will create a round-robin of processes, where each process spawns
> a child, and then dies (fork() returns 0 in the child process).  Extremely 
> difficult to kill these ones, because by the time you have a process-id 
> to kill, that process doesn't exist usually anymore!  This is an 

I had this problem once. I used a little program that did a kill -9 on a pid
that was ahead of the pid sequence from the runaway program. The kill -9 was
put into an infinite loop. There was a good chance that the kill would get the
process when its pid got big enough. (There was also some chance that an
innocent process would be killed, but not much).
-- 
Anthony Shipman                               ACSnet: als at bohra.cpg.oz.au
Computer Power Group
9th Flr, 616 St. Kilda Rd.,
St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia
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