# $Id: README,v 1.2 2012/10/08 19:42:27 ksb Exp $

This program could be a perl script, but that takes more VM than the tiny
C program.  It is also more error-prone for the pkill meme that we use to
terminate the forever shim, in the rare case where we need to do that.
{N.B. pkill ... "perl" is apt to kill random unrelated scrips.}

Let's compare the forever binary to the perl version:
 PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
6675 ksb         1  20    0   964K   556K pause  1   0:05  0.00% ksh
7452 ksb         1  20   20  1312K   560K pause  0   0:00  0.00% forever
7455 ksb         1  20    0  3204K  2532K pause  0   0:00  0.00% perl

The C version is about 40% the size, and about 22% of the RSS of the perl
version.  Since both processes will be swapped out after a while, the RSS
doesn't matter as much.  It might seem like a nit to save so little, but
every little bit helps.  For reference I included my shell, you can see
that the forever process compares nicely that process.

It might be clever to make forever chdir to slash.  I'm not sure about
that, and you can always do that yourself.  I included the close of the
standard fds because "forever <&- >&- 2>&-" requries a shell to run, and
was the most common usage in production.

--ksb, Oct 2012