Is it possible to make a console wait on another child process? - windows

Usually when a program is run from the Windows console, the console will wait for the process to exit and then print the prompt and wait for user input. However, if the process starts a child process, the console will still only wait for the first process to exit. It will not wait for the child as well.
Is there a way for the program to get the console to wait on another child process instead of (or as well as) the current process.
I would assume it's impossible because presumably the console is waiting on the process' handle and there's no way to replace that handle. However, I'm struggling to find any confirmation of this.

Is there a way for the program to get the console to wait on another child process instead of (or as well as) the current process.
No. As you noted, as soon as the 1st process the console creates has exited, the console stops waiting. It has no concept of any child processes being created by that 1st process.
So, what you can do instead is either:
simply have the 1st process wait for any child process it creates before then exiting itself.
if that is not an option, then create a separate helper process that creates a Job Object and then starts the main process and assigns it to that job. Any child processes it creates will automatically be put into the same job as well 1. The helper process can then wait for all processes in the job to exit before then exiting itself. Then, you can have the console run and wait on the helper process rather than the main process.
1: by default - a process spawner can choose to break out a new child process from the current job, if the job is setup to allow that.

Related

Child Process Termination in windows

I have .exe application in GO that spawns a child process in windows.
When i terminate my parent process for some reason the child process terminates too.
However when my parent.exe panics and crashed, the child process continue to execute and does not shutdown.
Ideally I was expecting the child process to keep on living if the parent process shuts down(normally or forcefully)
Is the the default behavior of processes in windows?
In addition to above.
I added code to capture any Signal the child process receives if I terminate the Parent Process, It seems that every time i terminate the parent process the child receives an interrupt signal.

Killing PPID can kill all child process association with it at same time?

I have tried to kill PPID process which terminate process (also kills child pid's) immediately sends signal back in seconds to one of my console, but child process are taking time to respond back termination response. Any one has any idea why it is happening..?
Whenever the parent process gets killed, the child processes become ORPHAN processes so the INIT process becomes the parent of the ORPHAN processes. As INIT process is created in such a way that whenever any process gets killed all of it's children are taken care by the INIT process until the processes finish.
It looks like the parent process did not catch any signals, while the child processes did.
Alternatively, the child processes had resources open and are attempting a graceful exit, making sure those resources are properly taken care of.
In this case you may need to rewrite the parent process to catch the signal, forward it to its children, and then wait() for them to finish, and exit.

Ensure orphaned processes are killed when the parent process dies

In Ruby, how do I ensure that child processes spawned from my program don't keep running when my main process exits or is killed?
Initially I thought I could just use at_exit in the main process, but that won't work if my main process gets kill -9ed or calls Kernel.exec. I need a solution that is (basically) foolproof, and cross-platform.
If you have to handle kill -9 termination for your parent app, then you have only a couple of choices that I can see:
Create a work queue manager and spawn/kill child processes from work queue manager. If you can't guarantee that the work queue manager won't also be killed without warning, then option 2 is your only choice I think, since the only thing you know for sure is that the child processes are still running.
http://www.celeryproject.org/
http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
More aggressive approach - basically spawn off whole OS instances but they'll definitely get killed off within your parameters for operation
Have the child processes check a "heartbeat" from the parent process through RPC or monitoring parent PID in memory or watching a date/time on keep-alive file in /tmp to make sure it's current.
If the child processes fail to see the parent processes doing it's job of either responding to RPC messages, staying in memory itself, or keeping a file date/time current the child processes must kill themselves.

How to catch console-closing event?

The context of my problem is:
I have a Windows .NET app (GUI) running as a main process.
From this (parent) process, I create a couple of sub-processes as console processes.
The main process sends data to the children processes through named pipes.
In the main app, I have a list of the sub-processes.
My probleme is that each console has a close ("x") button and can be terminated (whatever the way it is). Since I keep a list of the created consoles in my main app, I would like to know when a console is killed or exited.
My console (child process) program is simply a "main()" with a loop function that reads the pipe (and displays the data). It has no message system or whatever else that could handle a windowing "exit".
The first idea that comes to my head is to poll the sub-processes from the main app to refresh the list. But this means I have to introduce a timer or a thread that watches the consoles. I don't like the idea.
Does someone have a better idea?
WaitForSingleObject(hThread, 0) will tell you whether the thread specified in hThread argument is signaled and therefore finished. Same goes to hProcess.
Both handles of your child process are returned after CreateProcess() call. You can either close them immediately, or monitor using WaitForSingleObject.

Why is there timing problem while to fork child processes

When I took a look at the reference of 'Launching-Jobs' in gnu.org, I didn't get this part.
The shell should also call setpgid to put each of its child processes into the new process group. This is because there is a potential timing problem: each child process must be put in the process group before it begins executing a new program, and the shell depends on having all the child processes in the group before it continues executing. If both the child processes and the shell call setpgid, this ensures that the right things happen no matter which process gets to it first.
There is two method on the link page, launch_job () and launch_process ().
They both call the setpgid in order to prevent the timing problem.
But I didn't get why is there such a problem.
I guess new program means result of execvp (p->argv[0], p->argv); in launch_process(). And before run execvp, setpgid (pid, pgid); is always executed, without same function on launch_job ().
So again, why is there such a problem? (why we have to call setpgid (); on launch_job () either?)
The problem is that the shell wants the process to be in the right process group. If the shell doesn't call setpgid() on its child process, there is a window of time during which the child process is not part of the process group, while the shell execution continues. (By calling setpgid() the shell can guarantee that the child process is part of the process group after that call).
There is another problem, which is that the child process may execute the new program (via exec) before its process group id has been properly set (i.e. before the parent calls setpgid()). That is why the child process should also call setpgid() (before calling exec()).
The description is admittedly pretty bad. There isn't just one problem being solved here; it's really two separate problems. One - the parent (i.e. the shell) wants to have the child process in the right process group. Two - the new program should begin execution only once its process has already been put into the right process group.

Resources