bug in pclose(3)

[Chris Torek]

In article <261 at ecijmm.UUCP> jmm at ecijmm.UUCP writes:
>in some circumstances [pclose] will hang forever. ...
>Is this behaviour common to all System 5 variations?  To BSD
>derivatives?  SunOS?  AIX?  Your favourite here?

It is partially fixed in 4.3BSD (and, one hopes, derivatives), where
pclose() will return -1 if the process has already been reaped.

>Is there even a good general solution?

4.4BSD will have a `wait4' or `waitfor' syscall, to wait for a
particular process (or for any process, if the given pid is 0).
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris