fork, exec, _exit

["Sergey V. Udaltsov" <sergey oudaltsov clients ie>]

Hi all

A couple of days ago I noticed one problem with forked processes. In my
code, the child process is doing nothing but exec(). And in case of
problems - exit(). After some investigations (great thanks to Ivan
Pascal) it was found that GNOME/GTK is doing a lot of stuff using
atexit. So the only correct way to close the child is to call _exit()
(but not exit()!). Which is not too good - the program itself may want
to add some atexit hooks. So my question is - why does it all work this
strange way? Why GNOME/GTK could not have GtkTerm/GnomeTerm functions to
close/stop/term/finalize everything - and only main process would have
to call them. AFAIK, the current usage of atexit in GNOME conflicts with
the multi-process programming and X Window architecture (the connection
to X server should be used and closed in the same one process).

BTW, even current situation is not properly documented AFAIK. I found
the confirmation for this image in some mailing lists' archives. It
would be great to document the problem at least (in Gtk FAQ there are
special lines about threads, but nothing about processes).

Any comments/ideas?

Cheers,

Sergey