&*^%^$#%$*& USER!

[Fairlight]

From inside the gravity well of a singularity, Brian K. White shouted:
> 
> I should be able to spawn a child process and end it.
> 
> I don't understand precisely what filepro does when you close a user alias,
> but if I manually run cgc and close my session, it does not leave any
> defunct process behind.

Sounds like a lack of waitpid() use.  That's what lets the zombies build
up, when the parent never bothers reaping them on SIGCHLD.  I would submit
this to support as a bug in fP that wants fixing, if I were you.

You can have a child exit and close all fd's linked to it, but if you
don't waitpid() on your children, you end up with zombies, period, the end.  

I've noticed this in the past even with system(), I believe.  In neither
case does it reap its child processes.  I remember this distinctly because
my first client had a (wacky, IMHO, and I can say that because I said it
to his face--er, ear at least on the phone at the time, and we're still
great friends) method of doing CGI where he wanted one rclerk running at all
times and wanted it to fork off multiple other system() calls, which of
course started filling the process table.  BTDT.  Bad design given the fact
that fP doesn't reap.

mark->
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