John Maddock wrote:
Surely there's no need to call wait until the parent asks for the return value: In fact I'd kind of like the library to be similar to Boost.Threads - a child process is an object that can be waited upon, the library would only need to do something "fancy" like installing a signal hander, if the child object's destructor is called, without the object ever being waited upon.
Consider this: int main() { child::process mozilla; mozilla.spawn("mozilla"); return 0; }; You're suggestion, that child::process::~process() invokes wait() means that this program will not exit until mozilla exits. That doesn't seem reasonable here. Even less so if the function launching mozilla was in a control loop... child::process is a *handle* on the child. If the handle goes out of scope, then you lose the abiity to communicate with the child but you shouldn't kill it. I think that if you want to terminate the child, then you should be explicit about it. Either invoke process::terminate yourself or have a wrapper class that does so when the wrapper goes out of scope. Regards, Angus