[launchd-dev] Stray Proccess Log message

[Dave Zarzycki]

On Feb 22, 2008, at 6:15 AM, Geoff Franks wrote:

> 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?

Unless  you're consciously backgrounding sendmail, the bug is more  
likely in the sendmail program itself.

davez