Uncertain death

[Rickard Green]

We also consider this a bug (with low prio). There will be a fix for it 
released for R10B, but probably not in R10B-9.

Best Regards,
Rickard Green, Erlang/OTP

Dominic Williams wrote:
> Oh yes, I realize that. I'm not bothered at all by the delay,
> although I wouldn't mind a neater way of "waiting" for its
> death than timer:sleep/1.
> 
> What bothers me is the contradictory information provided by
> is_process_alive(Pid) and processes(). That seems like a bug
> to me.
> 
> Dominic.
> 
> 
> 
>>When you send an exit signal to a process,
>>it is scheduled in order to receive it.
>>This goes for 'kill' messages as well, even
>>though you'd think that they could be
>>killed right away by the runtime system.
>>
>>/Uffe
>>
>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED
>>>[mailto:owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED] On Behalf Of
>>>Dominic Williams
>>>Sent: den 17 november 2005 23:32
>>>To: 'erlang-questions@REDACTED'
>>>Subject: Uncertain death
>>>
>>>Hello,
>>>
>>>The following program seems to me to indicate that when a
>>>processes gets killed, there is, for a brief moment,
>>>contradictory information about its state. Specifically, the
>>>information returned by processes() seems to lag behind that
>>>given by is_process_alive().
>>>
>>>
>>>%%% death.erl
>>>
>>>-module (death).
>>>-export ([run/0, server/0]).
>>>
>>>run() ->
>>>     Pid = spawn (?MODULE, server, []),
>>>     exit (Pid, kill),
>>>     report (Pid),
>>>     timer:sleep(1000),
>>>     report (Pid).
>>>
>>>report (Pid) ->
>>>     io:fwrite("~p alive: ~p; member of processes(): ~p~n",
>>>               [Pid, is_process_alive (Pid),
>>>                lists:member(Pid, processes())]).
>>>
>>>server () ->
>>>     receive
>>>         hello ->
>>>             server();
>>>         stop ->
>>>             bye
>>>     end.
>>>
>>>%%% end death.erl
>>>
>>>1> c("/Users/dodo/tmp/death", [{outdir, "/Users/dodo/tmp/"}]).
>>>{ok,death}
>>>2> death:run().
>>><0.35.0> alive: false; member of processes(): true <0.35.0>
>>>alive: false; member of processes(): false ok
>>>
>>>Same result under MacOS/R9C and WinXP/R10B
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>
>>>Dominic Williams
>>>http://www.dominicwilliams.net
>>>
>>>----
>>>
>>
>