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Subject: Re: Reliable process tracking
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From: Tim Kientzle <tim@kientzle.com>
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On Aug 4, 2013, at 6:46 AM, Jilles Tjoelker wrote:

> When shutting down a service or requesting status, rc.subr currently
> uses a combination of pidfiles and process names. This is fairly but not
> completely reliable once it is set up correctly (which can take a lot of
> work and possibly patching the daemon to use pidfile(3) from our
> libutil). It is also incapable of killing multiprocess daemons such as
> CGI web servers without cooperation of the daemon.
> 
> I think what is needed here is a facility that marks a process and all
> of its descendants.

It sounds like all you really need is some way to
signal a process and all descendants.

Why do you need to actively mark and/or track them?

Tim