CODEWITHSUNDEEP
clinuxprocessfork
milo
milo

Reputation: 1220

number of child processes

Is there relyable way in UNIX to know how many child processes has my certain child process? For example, main process forks child process which exec login program, can i know whether login forked or not?

UPD i'm using C

Upvotes: 0

Views: 625

Answers (3)

Peter K.
Peter K.

Reputation: 8108

It's crude, but you could just use a popen version of what this page is doing, and parse the returned values.

Instead of grep-ing for httpsd you grep for your process. Or you could use the --ppid switch on the ps command and just get all the child processes of this parent process.

Upvotes: 0

pyroscope
pyroscope

Reputation: 4158

Children are linked via their ppid (parent pid) to the parent, so it's just a matter of following those links, depending on what language you use to implement that. The pstree command uses this to display the process tree.

Regarding "reliable", you have to handle processes appearing and disappearing all the time, best is to snapshot the running processes as fast as possible, and only then analyze the data.

Upvotes: 1

Anders Abel
Anders Abel

Reputation: 69260

You have to go through all processes, checking their PPID (Parent Process ID) and compare that to the PID of the process you want the children of.

Upvotes: 0

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