Is there a way to get a filehandle in the parent which becomes readable once a child has died? I can then put that filehandle in my event loop. I don't want to poll waitpid(0, NULL, WNOHANG) every 'n' seconds. That's a lame tradeoff between latency and sucking CPU.
Yeah, I can catch SIGCHLD, but I'd prefer to avoid that.
Some google queries:
Python's Twisted framework catches SIGCHLD, sets a flag, and then reaps children as part of its event loop? (Python's signal handling is like Perl's pre-5.8... unsafe, possibly between opcodes)
http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-commits/2003-March/006222.html
Pert's POE seems to block SIGCHLD at times and poll for dead children at other times:
http://www.dwam.net/docs/perl/site/lib/POE/Kernel.html
OCaml does more polling/SIGCHLD stuff:
http://www.ocaml-programming.de/....
So I'm starting to think there is no clean way, at least for what I consider clean. It's also entirely possible I have no clue what I'm talking about.
I could just have each child connect to a server in the parent, and when that connection dies, I know the child is gone?
Recommendations?
