Hi,
I have a perl script that runs each night that checks various
things on the system (dropped packets, file system sizes, etc). The
job runs from root's cron like this:
00 01 * * * /sbin/system_check.pl
Each time it runs, I also receive the message:
Can't ignore signal CHLD, forcing to default
After googling a bit, I found this:
Can't ignore signal CHLD, forcing to default
(W signal) Perl has detected that it is being run with the SIGCHLD
signal (sometimes known as SIGCLD) disabled. Since disabling this
signal will interfere with proper determination of exit status of child
processes, Perl has reset the signal to its default value. This
situation typically indicates that the parent program under which Perl
may be running (e.g. cron) is being very careless.
(see http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Reference/Products/ActivePerl/lib/Pod/perldiag.html)
I also found this post regarding the same issue in NetBSD:
http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=11778
The patch to OpenBSD listed in the post looks like it would apply
cleanly to the version of cron provided with Owl. However, after
looking at the source code, it looks to me like there is a reason that
SIG_IGN was used instead of SIG_DFL when USE_SIGCHLD is
defined. I'm not really a C or systems programmer, so I'm not really
sure.
It's not a big problem, as the script appears to run just fine. I'm just
trying to avoid an extra e-mail from each machine every day. And, I
would prefer not to redirect stderr to /dev/null in case there is a real
error. Has anyone else had this problem?
Thanks,
Steve Bremer
NEBCO, Inc.
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