OK, solved it by myself, did it the weird-apple way: A launchctl triggered backupfather.pl now creates Launchagents.plist for every child process including the calling arguments and triggers launchctl load/start for these creations... a lot of useless filewriting just for backgrounding processes for which a normal "&" would be enough as it seems but at least it works... Greets Johannes Am 27.07.2009 um 20:26 schrieb Johannes:
Sorry for reopening a thread that was already dealt with, but I ran into a serious problem that I'm not able to workaround in any way.
I have a perlscript (let's call it backupfather.pl) that calls a second perlscript (backupchild.pl) 15 times for initiating rsync over ssh backups from 15 different client-hosts.
The callerscript knows how to deal with open processes (keep them running for a designated time, kill them if the target host where it fetches the backup from isn't reachable or the backup script is overtime, don't launch the child script for a specific host if one process like that is still running)
Additionally it knows how to deal with the child processes of backupchild.pl (rsync and ssh) building up pid and parent pid trees and killing all involved before launching again with the same arguments.
So the processmanagement itself is clean.
In order to start the backupchild.pl script 15 times I need to background them. They may rund serveral hours so the backupfather.pl has to get free to initiate the finished backups again after an hour, not initiating the still running ones.
I've tried several ways to get out of the launchctl processgroup prison the backupfather.pl is running in.
setpgrp doesn't work on Mac OS X (that way it would be possible to let it run under the root's processgroups ID).
forking and exiting the backupchild.pl didn't help eighter, nore did creating 15 instances for each client backup and launching them as necessary. As soon as it comes to backgrounding I'm stuck in:
"Stray process with PGID equal to this dead job: PID _pidnumber_ PPID _parentpidnumber_ perl"
Any ideas how to get the backupchild.pl processes out of the launchctl prison?
Thanx in advance for any help, Johannes PS: If you're wondering why I don't use TimeMachine for Backups: We've used it till AppleFileServer started eating 100% CPU on the Server, rendering the Fileservice for the regular AFP Fileservice Clients unusable, while SSH at the same time had fullspeed and no problems. So splitting backup from fileservice was the deal for making fileservice useable again...