The program that would not go away

This post is about a program hang. The hang was in the Python process that was running Ansible scripts. The problem was hard to debug and had me go back to Unix textbook.

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unix  signals  fork  exec 

Correct way to create a directory in Python

Can you see the problem with this code? It comes from Ansible, v2.1.1.0.

if not os.path.exists(value):
     os.makedirs(value, 0o700)

It’s quite straightforward. It checks if a directory path exists. If it does not, then it creates the directory path, similar to mkdir -p. What could be wrong?

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Don't hang up on me

Can you tell me when a shell sends a “HANGUP” signal to a process? What happens if there is a pipeline? What if you prefix this pipeline with the “nohup” command?

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