run a process

[Rob Landley]

On Tuesday 30 March 2010 22:24:21 Murali K. Vemuri wrote:
> unfortunately, my process does not block. So, I cannot use "watch" on
> it.
> is there any alternative applet to do this?
>
> Thanks & regards
> Murali

So you have a process that doesn't block, but is randomly dying.  Huh.

Ok, you can write a program that will do an inotify to monitor its /proc/$PID 
direectory and if that directory is deleted, respawn the process, find the PID 
of the new one, do an inotify monitor on _that_, and repeat.  (Or you can just 
wimp out and do something like:

while true
done
  [ -z "$(pidof myprogname)" ] && myprogname
  sleep 60
done

Really, if you can get your process to block life becomes much easier.  You 
can always background a blocking process, but externally monitoring a non-
blocking one is painful, you wind up busy-waiting or doing strange things with 
/proc and hoping the current kernel version supports it.

Also, if the process you're monitoring is randomly dying, what makes you think 
the process doing the monitoring won't randomly die as well?  Sounds like 
either your system's unstable or the process you're monitoring is buggy.

Rob
-- 
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds