spawn safe, platform-independent dummy process in Python

Question

I'm writing some code that needs to run on different OS platforms and interact with separate processes. To write tests for it, I need to be able to create processes from python that do nothing but wait to be signaled to stop. I would like to be able to create some processes that recursively create more.

Also (this part might be a little strange), it would be best for my testing if I were able to create processes that weren't children of the creating process, so I could emulate conditions where, eg, os.waitpid won't have permission to interact with the process, or where one process signals a factory to create a process rather than creating it directly.

Answer 1

If you're using Python 2.6 the multiprocessing package has some stuff you might find useful.

There's a very simple example on my github . If you run spawner it will create 3 processes that run seperately, but use a channel to talk back to the spawner. So if you kill the spawner process the others you have started will die. I'm afraid there's a lot of redundant code in here, I'm in the middle of a refactoring, but I hope it gives a basic idea.