Re: [gtk-list] Re: fork()/exec() round 2

[James Bailie <jazzturk home com>]

Andrew Wood writes:

>   waitpid (-1, 0, WNOHANG);             /* reap any zombie children */

Really, it means reap one dead child. It's not a zombie yet. That's what we're
trying to avoid. Slapping a loop around the call, like this:

while( waitpid( -1, 0, WNOHANG ) > 0 );

is useful in a SIGCHLD handler, if you have multiple child processes, as
signals are not queued under *NIX, so a child dying during the execution of
the SIGCHLD handler would be missed otherwise. It may be missed anyway,
if the execution of your handler has passed this statement, so it's a good
idea to call your handler, when you exit as well, to clean up any missed
dead children.

--
James Bailie

http://users.imag.net/~lon.jbailie


-- 
--
James Bailie

http://users.imag.net/~lon.jbailie