[erlang-questions] terminating external port program

[Howard Yeh]

Hi All,

When the port's owner exits, the pipe is closed, but the program isn't
killed. Is this right?

The reference manual says that,

"The external program should terminate when the port is closed."

That means the external program needs to detect that pipe is closed and exits?

I am writing a script spawner/monitor with Erlang. The problem is if
the external script gets into a loop, it needs to be killed
explicitly. There has been a posting on this before,

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2001-July/003445.html

But writing a wrapper isn't a viable approach... that leaves me with
patching port_info? What's the reason of keeping the process id
hidden?

Howard