[H-GEN] Managing multiple child processes with perl

[Jason Henry Parker]

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Michael Anthon <michael at anthon.net> writes:

> This means that I am gzipping all 30G or so twice, which seems terribly
> inefficient to me.  So.. to get to my questions.  I am wanting to find a way
> to run the gzip processes in parallel (it's a dual CPU E250 running
> solaris).  The only possible way to do this that I can see is to fork the
> gzip processes, getting the PID of each one as it starts, then just watch
> for those processes to not be there any more (using ps or something).  This
> seems a little... icky and I was hoping someone could advise me on a better
> way to manage this.  

Sure.  The parent process will receive a SIGCHLD signal when a child
exits.  There is a large amount of documentation on how to manage
child processes in perl; see the perlipc and perlfork manpages; there
is probably also something in the Perl FAQ (perldoc -q).

> [1] There is a good reason for this.... if I try to use the built in
> drive compression it doesn't seem to fit on a single tape... and I
> have to use pipes because some of the files are >2G in size.

You don't have large file support enabled?  Hmm, okay.
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