fork/exec a child process from a bundle app

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Level 1

0 points

fork/exec a child process from a bundle app

Hello,

I current have two command line C applications, processA and processB.
All processA does is fork/exec processB.
This works as expected from the command line, and if I look in Activity Monitor
I can see them named under "Process Name" as processA and processB.

This simplicity all seems to fly out the window when you introduce a Bundle, and I can't figure out what is going on.

I make simple Bundle called processA.app.
It contains an Info.plist, a MacOS folder with processA and processB inside, and a PkgInfo file, all inside a Contents folder.
The Info.plist is correctly configured to point to processA.

When I run the bundle, both apps appear in the Activity Monitor under the name "processA". Why? Its like processB is still associated with the bundle for some reason and I don't want it to be. I even tried moving processB outside the bundle and executing it from there but its still the same.

Any ideas on this?

One final thing I noticed .. the C sleep() function seems to just not work
when used in a bundled app. Any reason?

Much thanks,
David

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on May 20, 2009 4:54 PM

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Answer 1

ericmeyers

Level 4

1,410 points

May 21, 2009 7:00 AM in response to dwibbitson

I can't duplicate your problem. Both the fork/exec and sleep appear to work properly from a bundle and the sleep function works.

My first process


#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
 pid_t p;
 p = fork();
 if (p) {
 execl("/Users/ericmeyers/meh2","/Users/ericmeyers/meh2",(char*) 0);
 }
 printf("process 1 sleeping ");
 sleep(10);
 return 0;
}

My second process


#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
 printf("%s","process 2 sleeping ");
 sleep(10);
 return 0;
}

You're being fooled by Activity Monitor. I think it shows the Process Group as the name. If you run top in a terminal then launch your bundle you'll see 2 processes with different names.

Eric

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Answer 2

dwibbitson Author

Level 1

0 points

May 21, 2009 2:51 PM in response to ericmeyers

Fooled indeed, thanks.

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