Python join a process without blocking parent

Question

I\'m writing a program that will watch a particular directory for new files containing download URLs. Once a new file is detected, it will create a new process to do the act

Answer 1

If you don't care about when and whether the child terminates, and you just want to avoid the child ending up as a zombie process, then you can do a double-fork, so that the grandchild ends up being a child of init. In code:

def child(*args):
  p = Process(target=grandchild, args=args)
  p.start()
  os._exit(0)

def grandchild(filename, wDir, dDir):
  # Open filename and extract the url
  ...
  # Download the file and to the dDir directory
  ...
  # Delete filename from the watch directory
  ...
  # exit cleanly
  os._exit(0)