In article <200101102235.HAA11640 / hanare00.math.sci.hokudai.ac.jp>,
GOTO Kentaro <gotoken / math.sci.hokudai.ac.jp> wrote:
>In message "[ruby-talk:9076] Re: pid of executed program"
>    on 01/01/11, Phil Tomson <ptkwt / user2.teleport.com> writes:
>
>>Unfortuneatly, no.  I've been trying to do the same thing.  The pid you
>>get back from fork is the pid of the shell that the external command was
>>exec'ed into, not the pid for the command itself.  What I find is that if
>>I send a SIGTERM to the pid I get back from fork it does indeed kill the
>>shell, but the child pid (the pid for the command that was exec'ed) isn't
>>effected and the child just continues to run.
>
>See [ruby-talk:8631], i.e.,
>http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/8631

Wow, I see that this reference is to a response to one of my posts to this
newsgroup, yet I never saw it in my newsreader - my ISP is being taken
over by another and I suspect that news is a bit messed up right now.

Anyway,  You say that I should do a: 

kill "SIGTERM", 0

but won't that also kill the currently running script?

Phil