Quick and dirty implementation of the below challenge specification. Went with plain old C with no outside dependencies (aside from gcc/ GNU Autotools for building).

Click "Downloads" to grab a tarball of the repository.

To build and run:

bash$ tar zxvf joshrotenberg-challenge-XXXXXXX.tar.gz bash$ cd joshrotenberg-challenge-XXXXXXX/ bash$ ./configure && make && ./src/challenge

Write a program in a language of your choice that forks 10 children, where each child simultaneously creates (in parallel) a file where each filename is in the format of . in the current directory and writes their pid to the file, then writes the following string back to the parent via some form of inter-process communication:

The parent waits on each child and writes a sorted report to stdout for each child:

Where should be replaced by process ID and should be replaced by {SUCCESS,FAILURE}. FAILURE should be reported for any error/exception of the child and the specific error messages should go to stderr (parent or children). Exceptions/errors must be caught and handled gracefully.

The parent should always write 10 records, one for each child unless the parent itself dies unexpectedly (signal handling of the parent not needed).

If you choose Java, use the analogous guidelines in terms of thread-spawning and inter-thread communication.