Cathey, Jim wrote:
The rule is pretty simple: If you die, and your parent is still in the process
list (regardless of its state), then you're a zombie until your parent reaps
you. If you die and your parent is not in the process list, then init(8) reaps
you at its earliest convenience. If you're a zombie and then your parent dies
without reaping you, the kernel adopts you to init(8), who then reaps you at
its earliest convenience. A process ALWAYS has a parent, either its original
parent or init(8), and that parent is always responsible for reaping you upon
your death. This is part of the very definition of Unix, and all its
descendants. If this isn't happening, there is a bug in init(8), and/or the
kernel.
In no way are you required to reap your own children before death, whether
deliberate or accidental, and you never have been.
However, there are no particular time constraints upon this reaping by init(8).
It could be busy doing something, even something as innocuous as logging to a
file, that causes a delay. If your system is designed to require a fast reap
somehow, then you must reap your own children. But that's a particular system
issue, not a generic problem. I could argue that perhaps this is an
ill-designed system, if it's relying upon unspecified behavior.
This is true. However creating many children and leaving them as zombies
consumes resources which will be exhausted at some point, on smaller
systems sooner.
If you don't intend to wait for the children just set SIGCHLD to ignore
and you don't have to care about this problem.
_______________________________________________
busybox mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
