[erlang-questions] Strange Socket Behaviour Was:Parents always take children with them?

[Ludovic Coquelle]

gen_tcp return a tuple,
so the line marked as critical doesn't help, it may kill the process because
X is not a list.
(change it to io:format("~p~n", [X]) to see if it's better).

... so the normal behavior is that gen_recv doesn't block, which is probably
intended since you request 0 byte with infinity timeout

2 newby cents

On 4/29/07, andrew cooke <andrew@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>
> I was wrong about parent processes, but I now have no explanation for the
> following.
>
> -define(BASE_TCP, [list, inet, {packet, raw}, {active, false}]).
>
> start() ->
>     {ok, A} = inet:getaddr("10.2.0.1", inet),
>     {ok, P} = gen_tcp:connect(A, 3128, ?BASE_TCP),
>     spawn(fun() ->
>                   io:format("blocking~n"),
>                   X = gen_tcp:recv(P, 0),
>                   io:format("~p~n", X),  %%% critical
>                   io:format("done")
>           end).
>
> This blocks on recv (as expected).  But if the line marked "critical" is
> omitted, then the call does not block ("done" is printed immediately).
>
> As far as I can tell, Erlang has eager evaluation, and the above is a
> simplified version of a similar problem in a more complex program where
> the same problem occurs (recv fails to block) even though the result is
> observed (the value {error, closed} was returned).  So I do not understand
> the behaviour.
>
> The "spawn" is necessary - without it, the recv blocks whether the
> "critical" line is present or not.
>
> The above was invoked with
>   emake; erl -noshell +W i -run <module name>
> in Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.5.4 [source] [64-bit]
> [async-threads:0] [hipe]
>
> Can someone explain this?  Is it a bug?
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew
>
>
> > Do children processes die when the parent finishes (even normally)?
> >
> > If so, is there any way to stop this, or do I simply have to arrange
> that
> > the last child is called directly rather than spawned (imagine a parent
> > spawning a set of children and then exiting)?  Doing this (redirecting
> the
> > parent thread "into" the final child) makes my code less symmetric than
> I
> > would like :o)  I would prefer it if a parent could be made to wait for
> > all children to terminate (if terminating normally).
>
>
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