general question about running scripts.

[Stef Bon]

Hello all,

I'm working with scripts which are started by ConsoleKit. Now this isn't 
a question about ConsoleKit, but about
starting a script and not waiting for it to return.

I've been working on a solution to make networkresources available via 
autofs on a dynamic way. After login with help
from ConsoleKit a mountpoint is added to the master file of the 
automounter. This mountpoint is in the homedirectory of the user logging 
in.

This way I've a browseable network map in my home directory for Windows 
Networks (via cifs), FTP (via curlftpfs/FUSE) and SSH (with sshfs/FUSE). 
Others, like Novell should be possible.

Now, the adding of the mountpoint to the auto.master file (and the 
reloading of the autofs daemon) is done by ConsoleKit, which runs 
scripts it finds in the some directories (/etc/ConsoleKit/run-session.d)
The problem here is that these script may not too long. This is 
problematic, because determinating the networkresources an user
has access to, can take some time, and can even take too much time, when 
there are networkproblems. So, I cannot let ConsoleKit wait for this 
script to finish. I've read some where that you can achieve this not 
waiting behaviour by adding an "&" after the shell script. An term for 
this is running asynchronous. Ok, but now what happens? ConsoleKit does 
not wait, which is what I wanted, but it looks like that my "add network 
mountpoint" script is running completely ascynchronous. It's calling 
other programs, and it looks like everything is running asynchronous, 
and it's making a mess of it.

Does anybody know what's happening here and how I can prevent this?
I hope you as reader can understand the problem.

Stef Bon