how to tell when jobs are finished

[Pedro Díaz Jiménez]

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Hi,

I agree with Sean about the use of waitpid(). About the daemon, well, I think 
is not necesary. If I not  misunderstood you, what you want to do is execute 
a certain number of programs and know when anyone of those programs exited. 
Here is my proposal, in  the form of a pseudo-shell

1.read somehow the list of programs to execute
2. For each program to run, create a child using fork() (the master
creates all the childs)
3. (optional) you may want to redirect each child output to some file
4. get from the childs its pid via some IPC mechanism (a pipe will do) and
store the in an array or something (i would use a linked list, or a 
search-tree table if you will have lots of pids)
5. Finally, each child calls exec*() and replaces its memory image with the 
program desired - that is - executes the program
6. Now, you have to know when each of the programs you executed has exited. 
For simplicity, lets assume you whant to printf something like "Hey!, PID
XXXX finished!". You can do this in two forms (to mi knowledge):
	a) loop until all the programs have exited. You can use waitpid with WNOHANG 
to poll each pid. Advantage: Simple.  Disadvantage: You can't do other 
productive things while waiting 
	b) Set a signal handler to the alarm signal, and test say each second for 
completion of one of the pids in your list. If completion, print message and 
remove that pid from the list. Disable signal callback when list is empty, 
and re-enable when list has at leat one element. Advantages: You can do other 
productive things, like launching more processes. Disadvantages: A little 
more complicated. If you use this option, see sigaction(2) and signal(2)


I hope that I didn't missunderstand you and the above will help

Cheers
Pedro
On Wednesday 01 August 2001 15:52, Nicholas Henke wrote:
> I think that might work--- what I am trying to do is start the job via
> bpsh or brexec ( to be determined...), from each I can get the pid. I am
> wondering what is the RightWay(tm) to tell that the job is no longer
> executing. I think wait may work, but I wonder about the scalability of
> that. Am I right in assuming that I would need to have a daemon that
> monitors the entire list of pids at a certain interval?
>
> Thanks :-)
> Nic
>
> On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Sean Dilda wrote:
> > On Wed, 01 Aug 2001, Nicholas Henke wrote:
> > > Hello--
> > > 	I am writing a resource manager based on top of bproc, and I am
> > > working on job execution. I am wondering if anyone has any ideas on how
> > > to tell when a job is finished executing. The only solution that I have
> > > thought of is to wrap the command in a shell script that tells the
> > > resource manager that the job is done executing.
> > >
> > > Any help would be greatly appreciated
> >
> > I'm going to assume you're wanting to know how to do this from a
> > programming level.  My advice is to save the pid of the job, then use
> > waitpid() with the WNOHANG option to check if the job has finished or
> > not.  'man 2 wait' for more information on using waitpid().
> >
> > If this isn't what you're looking for, please give me more information
> > on what exactly you are trying to do and I'll try to help you out.

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  __________________________________________________
 /                                                  \
 | Pedro Diaz Jimenez                               |
 |                                                  |
 | pdiaz88 at terra.es      pdiaz at acm.asoc.fi.upm.es   |
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 | http://planetcluster.org                         |
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