Can I rely absolutely on what happens when a process dies.

Cathey, Jim jcathey at ciena.com
Tue Dec 7 17:54:45 UTC 2010


> I enabled the "write your pid to this file" option... but of course
the
> file persists after the process dies... so if you look in the file for
a
> pid... and some other process has started up in the meantime with the
> SAME pid, you will send your signal to the wrong flipping process.

The whole PID-in-a-file thing was designed back in a day when it might
have taken _days_ for a PID to get reused.  Pretty safe.  The faster
systems get, which encourages process churn exacerbating the problem,
the worse the problem gets.

-- Jim



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