Bug in kill?

rich-paul@rich-paul.net
Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:03:36 -0800 (PST)


There seems to be a bug in kill ... or it's a documentation bug, I'm not
sure which.

As I undertstand it,

kill(pid,0) should return 0 only if process #pid exists ... however, it
seems to be returning 0 no matter what ... so one can't use it to test
the existance of a process. :(

This would be useful when starting a daemon, among other things ... read
the .pid file, and if kill(pid,0) returns an ESRCH, then just delete the
file, since the process is no longer running.

Is my reading wrong?

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