Minivend Crash Continued

["Bill" <bill@webteam.net>]

Hi all,

I've continued to work on the crashing problem I'm experiencing with Digital
Unix when the reload button is pressed quickly by a user.  The problem
appears to stem from MiniVend not waiting for a child process to exit.  When
this happens, the child process becomes <defunct>.  As a result MiniVend
locks.  Here is a snippet from 'man'

[Digital]  When you enter a ps command while running an application
that forks child processes, you might see some child processes listed
as being in the <defunct> state after they have exited.  Processes in
this state cannot be killed until the process that forked them is
killed.

[Digital]  The system puts exiting child processes in the <defunct>
state if their parent process is still running and has not caught the
SIGCHLD signal or executed a wait() system call.

[Digital]  To avoid having users encounter this problem when they run
your application, make sure that your program logic either catches the
SIGCHLD signal or executes a wait() system call when spawning a child

I think I've narrowed the problem to forking, given the above, and given
that MiniVend doesn't crash when running debug in the foreground.  I still
haven't been able to determine the exact location of the problem in the code
though.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Bill Rothbauer