Is there a good way to alter execution order of child processes created with fork()?

Question

I am looking for creating child processes for which I can control their order of processing.

Simple example:

• Parent creates 2 children with fork

Answer 1

You need to use actual inter-process communication to achieve this.

You seem to think that the waitpid() function has something to do with waiting for a process to print output, but that's not at all what it does.

Create a semaphore in the parent, pass it to both children, and have one child wait on the semaphore before printing and the other one messaging the semaphore after it's done printing.