correct usage of erlang spawn_monitor - erlang

Question

Still working through Joe's book, and having hard time fully understanding monitors in general and spawn_monitor in particular. Here's the code I have; the exercise is asking to write a function that will start a process whose job is to print a heartbeat every 5 seconds, and then a function to monitor the above process and restart it. I didn't get to a restart part, because my monitor fails to even detect the process keeling over.
% simple "working" loop
loop_5_print() ->
receive
after 5000 ->
io:format("I'm still alive~n"),
loop_5_print()
end.
% function to spawn and register a named worker
create_reg_keep_alive(Name) when not is_atom(Name) ->
{error, badargs};
create_reg_keep_alive(Name) ->
Pid = spawn(ex, loop_5_print, []),
register(Name, Pid),
{Pid, Name}.
% a simple monitor loop
monitor_loop(AName) ->
Pid = whereis(AName),
io:format("monitoring PID ~p~n", [Pid]),
receive
{'DOWN', _Ref, process, Pid, Why} ->
io:format("~p died because ~p~n",[AName, Why]),
% add the restart logic
monitor_loop(AName)
end.
% function to bootstrapma monitor
my_monitor(AName) ->
case whereis(AName) of
undefined -> {error, no_such_registration};
_Pid -> spawn_monitor(ex, monitor_loop, [AName])
end.
And here's me playing with in:
39> c("ex.erl").
{ok,ex}
40> ex:create_reg_keep_alive(myjob).
{<0.147.0>,myjob}
I'm still alive
I'm still alive
41> ex:my_monitor(myjob).
monitoring PID <0.147.0>
{<0.149.0>,#Ref<0.230612052.2032402433.56637>}
I'm still alive
I'm still alive
42> exit(whereis(myjob), stop).
true
43>
It sure stopped the loop_5_print "worker" - but where's the line that the monitor was supposed to print? The only explanation that I see is that the message emitted by a process quitting in this manner isn't of the pattern on which I am matching inside monitor loop's receive. But that's the only pattern introduced in the book in this chapter, so I'm not buying this explanation..

Answer 1

spawn_monitor is not what you want here. spawn_monitor spawns a process and immediately starts monitoring it. When the spawned process dies, the process that called spawn_monitor gets a message that the process is dead. You need to call erlang:monitor/2 from the process that you want to receive the DOWN messages in, with the second argument being the Pid to monitor.
Just add:
monitor(process, Pid),
after:
Pid = whereis(AName),
and it works:
1> c(ex).
{ok,ex}
2> ex:create_reg_keep_alive(myjob).
{<0.67.0>,myjob}
I'm still alive
I'm still alive
I'm still alive
3> ex:my_monitor(myjob).
monitoring PID <0.67.0>
{<0.69.0>,#Ref<0.2696002348.2586050567.188678>}
I'm still alive
I'm still alive
I'm still alive
4> exit(whereis(myjob), stop).
myjob died because stop
true
monitoring PID undefined