potential exec/nohup/timeout improvement for Linux: prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG)

[Eric Blake]

Rich Jones just taught me about Linux' prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG), which
allows you to run a helper executable that will automatically be killed
if its parent process dies.  I'm trying to figure out if coreutils
should provide support for that API via any of its existing wrapper
utilities (in fact, it sounds somewhat like the opposite of nohup -
instead of spawning a child process that survives the shell's death, we
want to be able to spawn a child process that automatically cleans
itself up on the shell's death).  Or maybe we make a new wrapper
utility.  However, since the functionality is currently Linux-only, I'm
also wondering if coreutils is still a good choice for this
functionality, or if we should pursue exposing it in some other package
of useful shell utilities.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature