Spawning processes

[Vlad Dumitrescu (EAW)]

Hi,

Since it's friday, I hope I may be excused if I just don't see the obvious. Please point it out to me! :-)

I need to have a named process available at all times. The solution I came up with is to have each interface function do something like
    Pid = start(),
    Pid ! Msg
where start() checks if there is a process registered, and if not starts it and registers; otherwise the current Pid is returned. This works fine, until one tries to do several calls in a row to an unexisting process: all try to start and register the server, because the registration doesn't have time to do it's job...

Is there another way to do something like this? I need to introduce this in a working system and don't know from which process it will be called first, and also have no control over the startup order...

Thanks in advance. Regards,
Vlad