Thanks annibuddha (was that how you spell it?) seeing bb666's post i thought i'd post this...

I had a bit of trouble as i added more children but decided to store the parent id at the start:

pid=getpid()

than later i just checked the variable which i understand would be in all the children against against getpid()

i.e. to make a child process stop and wait forever after it was created:

if(pid!=getpid()) //this is not the parent
for(;;)

then the processes just sit there until they are killed (hopefully )