Killing processes in windows

[Jim Cant]

Here is a question dealing with Xwindows (Motif, actually) under
AIX on a RS6000.

I have an monitor program whose role in life is to start a (arbitrary)
number of applications as child processes (fork/exec paradigm),
then wait and when one of them dies, restart it.  It keeps track
of the children by the process IDs returned by fork.

When its time to quit, the monitor program sends a signal to each
child which is trapped so the children can exit gracefully.

I would like to run each application in a separate window by 
having the exec calls of the children run aixterm with the -c
switch to start the application in the window.  Which works
fine.

The rub is that I can't gracefully kill the children, which
are the aixterm processes.  It seems that aixterm ignores
SIGTERM; all that it cares about is SIGKILL.  So... is there
any way to make aixterm pay attention to other signals AND
to pass a friendly signal on the the application it is running?

(I can get the job done by having the "grandchild", i.e. the application,
send a message via a pipe or message queue to the "grandparent", i.e.
the monitor program, telling it its process ID so it could be killed
'directly' but this seems cumbersome.)  Is there an elegant way to do
this or am I stuck with the inflexibility of aixterm?.

Might there be a system call the monitor could make which 
given a process ID (of the aixterm) would return process ID(s)
of the the children (the application is this case?).

Thanks for all your wise and helpfuls suggestions I know you are
dying to send my way. 


Jim Cant, cant at mrmarx.msc.com   I don't care what the company thinks
Mainstream Software Corp.	about what I think or say nearly as much
411 Waverly Oaks Road		I care about how my boy responds to same.
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