joshua@athertn.Atherton.COM (Flame Bait) (10/27/89)
I'm trying to write a routine which will check if a process is still alive.
On real UNIX, I can use kill(2) to send a zero signal to the process. If
the process in question is a zombie or dead, I will get an error. On AIX,
however, killing a zombie process does not cause an error.
I have three questions:
How can I write a routine which will take a pid and return TRUE if the
process is alive and well, and FALSE if it is dead or zombie?
Isn't this a bug? The man pages says that sending a zero signal can
be used to "check the validity of pid." I would think that a zombie
process is not valid.
Is this part of some standard I do not know about? Does POSIX or SVID
require this behavor?
Obviously, I can run ps and look at its output, or read kmem, but I want
something fast and portable. Thanks for any help.
Joshua Levy
-------- Quote: "If you haven't ported your program, it's not
Addresses: a portable program. No exceptions."
joshua@atherton.com
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