[launchd-dev] Stray Proccess Log message

Dave Zarzycki zarzycki at apple.com
Thu Feb 21 15:31:03 PST 2008


On Feb 21, 2008, at 12:52 PM, Geoff Franks wrote:

> I have a previously-cronned job that I'm moving to launchd on my new  
> 10.5
> server. It runs every 10 minutes, and causes the following entry to  
> show up
> in the syslog:
>
> Feb 21 15:43:45 server1 com.apple.launchd[1]
> (edu.buffalo.hwi.raidutil[43977]): Stray process with PGID equal to  
> this
> dead job: PID 43983 PPID 1 sendmail
>
> The script the launchd job runs calls sendmail a the end of it, so  
> my guess
> is that the script finishes, while sendmail is still running, and then
> launchd has to clean up after the script exits, so tries to kill the
> sendmail process. However, my emails are all going through and  
> seemingly
> working properly.

That is probably just luck.

> Additionally, I specified the AbandonProccessGrop  <true/>
> key in the plist so it wouldn't try cleaning up the other processes  
> spawned.
> Shouldn't this take care of the log message?

Nope. We hope that you'll someday update the script to either wait for  
descendant processes to finish, or alternatively, properly daemonize  
them.

davez


More information about the launchd-dev mailing list