Jeff Trawick wrote:
William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
Wham. Zombie gone, result code not longer recoverable, if I understand things correctly?
no, what makes a zombie go away? this just queries the kernel to see if the pid is valid... it does not affect the process at all
while a zombie is unaffected, both kill(pid,0) and getpgid(pid) will report that the process is alive if it is indeed in zombie state... probably not a good thing for a general purpose are-you-alive function
this didn't hurt mod_cgid's similar logic to test for a script child because mod_cgid ensured that it doesn't have to reap status to clean up zombies
