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Erlang / Erlang Advanced Interview questions

What is the difference between linking and monitoring a process?

Both let one process find out when another terminates, but they differ in direction and severity of the notification. A link is bidirectional and, by default, fatal: if either linked process crashes, the other receives an exit signal and dies too, unless it's trapping exits.

A monitor (erlang:monitor(process, Pid)) is unidirectional and never fatal: only the monitoring process is notified, and that notification always arrives as an ordinary {'DOWN', Ref, process, Pid, Reason} message rather than an exit signal that could kill it.

LinkMonitor
Bidirectional; both sides affect each other.Unidirectional; only the caller is notified.
Default behavior can kill the other side.Never kills anything; always a message.
Typically used between a supervisor and its children. Typically used by a client that needs to know a server died, without being tied to its lifecycle.
What is the key directional difference between a link and a monitor?
How does a monitored process's death get reported to the monitoring process?

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