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Graphs and Process Trees

Alex Chen40 min readUpdated

The process tree is the Palo Alto Networks question closest to the product. You get rows with a name, a pid and a parent pid, and you print the tree. A Tel Aviv team lead got it as a first coding question, and it keeps coming up in other Israel loops. Cortex XDR shows an alert as the chain of processes that started each other, so the interviewers know this data well.

The other three are standard graph problems, from a phone screen, a coding round and a hiring manager who then asked how to make one of them faster with threads. One needs more than a plain visited set, which reports loops that aren't there. Start with the process tree. Then do the ordering and cycle problems back to back, since a DFS answer to one runs the same check as the other.

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