How can a child learn of its parents termination?

[Paul Dow CRI-UK]

In article <94559 at lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>, booloo at lll-crg.llnl.gov (Mark Boolootian) writes:
|> The subject pretty much says it all:  Is it possible for a child to receive
|> notification of its parent's termination?  One possibility would be to check
|> the parent process id from time to time but this won't help me.  I have a
|> child sleeping on a semaphore, normally awakened by the parent.  If the parent
|> terminates, the child is going to sleep forever.  I need some way of waking
|> the child up upon parent's death so that the child may exit.
|> 

A couple of ideas might be:

1) Use the SEM_UNDO option for a semaphore - this can be used to adjust the value
   of a semaphore when a process exits.

2) Use a pipe between the parent & child process.  The child could then detect
   the loss of the pipe.

It sounds to me as if option 1) is what will provide what you're looking for.

Paul.