Re: Reaping a process without a parent process/service/daemon

Hello,

I am currently in the process of porting my company's application from
UNIX/Linux to Windows. The way our application currently runs is as follows:
We have a daemon process that runs in the background and polls a database.
As soon as it detects a pre-defined condition in the database, it forks and
execs a child process that carries out some specified behavior.

In the Windows world, we would normally just replace the daemon with a
Windows service. However, we are trying to avoid doing so, and would like to
just be able to manually directly execute the processes that the
daemon/service would normally kick off. This should be straightforward,
however, there is one piece of functionality that the UNIX/Linux daemon
process used to provide that I am not sure how to duplicate if we don't have
some sort of parent process/service: The daemon would check the status of
the child processes (i.e. using waitpid) and take appropriate actions
depending on if the child exited cleanly or not.

I know that Visual C++ has the GetExitCodeProcess method that is equivalent
to waitpid, but this would involve at least having some sort of shell/parent
process that kicks off the underlying process to monitor (not necessarily a
service, but still not running the process directly). Is there any other way
in the Windows world to determine the status of a process? I have heard some
ideas such as check the Windows Event Log and such, but I wanted to see if
anybody in the forums had a more specific/programmatic solution.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Also, please let me know if I posted this
to the wrong place (it seemed like the most fitting, but I apologize if it's
not).