pthreads, fork+exec, and deadlocks

[Aidan Van Dyk <aidan at highrise dot ca>]

I'm writing a threaded application which needs to be able to run other
programs for events/notifications, etc.

Having a thread that does a "fork() + exec()" leaves me with the
situation where the glibc internal mutexes/etc cloned can allready be
locked.  In particular, the one I'm concerned about is syslog_lock.

After fork(), I want to close all file descriptors, endpwent(),
closelog(), manage stdio/stderr/stdin etc. properly before doing the
exec().

Is there any way to lock/unlock/re-intialize the syslog_lock used in
openlog/closelog/vsyslog, or should I be explicitly guarding all syslog
usage with an additional application mutex for a safe fork?

Or are there better ways/models to handle exec'ing programs from large
threaded applications?

Thanks for any hints/pointers/links/etc.
a.

-- 
Aidan Van Dyk                                             Create like a god,
aidan@highrise.ca                                       command like a king,
http://www.highrise.ca/                                   work like a slave.