cron hanging on to child processes

[Pete French]

I have a process which is run daily from cron that stops mysql, does
some stuff, and starts it again. The scriput outputs a number of lines
which are emailed to me in the output of the cron job.

What I have noticed is that my emials actually lag by a day - it turns out
that the cron job appears to not send the email until mysql is sut down the
following day. I can only assume that when mysql is restarted, cron sees it
as a child process, and thus does not terminate until that process does. Which
happens when a new cron job shuts it down again 24 hours later.

Any suggestions on fixing this ? I wouldn't have thought that stopping
and starting a daemon was a particularly unusual thing to want to
do from a cron job.

-pete.