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I'm writing some code that needs to run on different OS platforms and interact with separate processes. To write tests for it, I need to be able to create processes from python that do nothing but wait to be signaled to stop. I would like to be able to create some processes that recursively create more.

Also (this part might be a little strange), it would be best for my testing if I were able to create processes that weren't children of the creating process, so I could emulate conditions where, e.g., os.waitpid won't have permission to interact with the process, or where one process signals a factory to create a process rather than creating it directly.

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If you're using Python 2.6 the multiprocessing package has some stuff you might find useful.

There's a very simple example on my github. If you run spawner it will create 3 processes that run seperately, but use a channel to talk back to the spawner. So if you kill the spawner process the others you have started will die. I'm afraid there's a lot of redundant code in here, I'm in the middle of a refactoring, but I hope it gives a basic idea.

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Yep, I'm aware of the multiprocessing package. It seems like the right idea, but I see a lot of gotchas with it, and I still can't come up with any way to indirectly create processes (the 2nd part of my question).
I've got some old code that shows so pretty basic spawning, I'll see if I can find it and post it.
Alright, I've mostly figured out what I'm doing. I can create a child process that creates its own child for some of my test cases, and for others I can create siblings: one dummy process and a 2nd process to run test code on its sibling.

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