Avoid race condition with Popen.send_signal

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Jérôme <jerome at 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