[launchd-dev] Stray Proccess Log message

[Geoff Franks]

On 2/21/08 6:31 PM, "Dave Zarzycki" <zarzycki at apple.com> wrote:

> 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

This is a 10 line bash script that I ran as a cron job previously. It
emailed on failures. Why would I daemonize something like that?

Geoff Franks
Sr. Systems Administrator
Hauptman Woodward Institute