posix fork, killing all child processes

[parkie]

The code below creates 10 processes and then calls function(); which is kept in another file.

        for (i=0; i<10; i++)
        {
                switch (pid = fork())
                {
                        case -1:
                                printf("Fork Error\n");
                                break;
                        case 0:
                                function(); //in another file
                                break;
                }
                
        }

1) how do i find out each processes pid? (within main code block above)
or how do i kill all of the child processes?

[Rubberman]

Your code is not likely doing what you want. In your example, each forked child process will continue to fork additional threads after returning from function(). So, instead of a break after function(), you should call exit(0) which will terminate the child while the parent process continues to fork the children you asked for. Also, fork() returns a pid_t type, which is the child process ID. If it is -1, you have an error (as you obviously know). If 0 then you are in the child process context. If other than 0 or -1, then you have a valid process ID of the child process in the context of the parent forking process. So, you might want to do this:

        for (i=0; i<10; i++)
        {
                switch (pid = fork())
                {
                        case -1: // Error
                                printf("Fork Error\n");
                                break;
                        case 0: // Child process
                                function(); //in another file
                                exit(0);
                        default: // In parent process
                                printf("Child (%d) Created\n", (int)pid);
                                break;
                }
        }

[parkie]

Thanks, that is exactly what i was needing, I will have to read up a bit more how forking is used/works.

Thanks again.