Re: process ID, collisions

[Andrew Wittenberg <andyw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Inspired by a suggestion from Joe Sirott, here's a platform-independent
way to get the process identification (PID) of Ferret.  One simply needs
to obtain the PARENT process identification (PPID) of the shell launched
by the SPAWN command.  So create a Perl script "ppid":

#!/usr/bin/perl
print getppid . "\n";

and place it in a location accessible to the Ferret SPAWN command (e.g. in
your PATH).  Then access the PID in Ferret v5.4x using

yes? let pid = {spawn:"ppid"}

If your system doesn't have Perl, see Joe's C program "ppid.c" below;
you'll need to compile it separately for each platform on which you run
Ferret.

Cheers,

Andrew

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Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 16:45:38 -0700
From: Joe Sirott <sirott@pmel.noaa.gov>
Subject: Re: process ID, collisions

If your shell doesn't support a method for returning the parent process
id, and you don't want to hassle with external functions, it's trivial to
write a program to return it. I've included it below. Compile it with:

    gcc -o ppid ppid.c

and call it from Ferret as:

    sp ppid

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("%d\n",getppid());
}