Can messages be sent to processes interactively?

[Martin Bjorklund]

"Craig Dickson" <crd@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> I thought spawn_link together with exit trapping was pretty much the best
> way to deal with failures in worker processes. Would a real Erlang guru do
> something different? If so, what?

Take a look at the functions in the module proc_lib.  The functions
proc_lib:spawn and spawn_link are as the BIFs, but creates a crash
report, should the new process crash.  There are also two functions
start & start_link, which are synchronous - they return when the new
process has been started and initialized.  All system processes use
these functions (most of them use proc_lib:start_link indirectly via
gen_server:start_link). 

To see the crash reports, statr erlang as:

erl -boot start_sasl -sasl errlog_type error

(see sasl(6) for details about errlog_type)


/martin