On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Jérôme <jer...@jolimont.fr> wrote: > If so, I don't see how I can protect myself from that. Checking the process > is alive and then hoping that the time interval for the race condition is so > small that there are few chances for that to happen (because the OS > quarantines PID numbers for a while, for instance) ?
The probability is extremely small. PIDs are generally allocated sequentially, and obviously one won't be reallocated until the previous process has terminated. You're looking at a narrow window of opportunity between a check and an action; you don't really need to worry about PID reuse within that window, unless there's a particular reason to fear it (eg your process is very low priority, or there's a lot of "process spinning" happening). Under normal circumstances, you won't see a new process start up with the same PID for some time. (I can't make a statement on Python's module, though.) ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list