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Date:      Tue, 2 Sep 1997 12:51:47 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        dg@root.com
Cc:        "Jamil J. Weatherbee" <jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: SIGCLD
Message-ID:  <19970902125147.42934@lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <199709020249.TAA16490@implode.root.com>; from David Greenman on Mon, Sep 01, 1997 at 07:49:17PM -0700
References:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.970901184254.3269A-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org> <199709020249.TAA16490@implode.root.com>

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On Mon, Sep 01, 1997 at 07:49:17PM -0700, David Greenman wrote:
>>>  however, you change the default to explicitly ignore the signal, the
>>>  system ignores SIGCHLD and SIGCLD, but it also no longer creates
>>>  zombie processes.  If you set the disposition of SIGCHLD and SIGCLD
>>>  to ignore, but you call wait anyway, it waits until all child
>>>  processes have terminated, and then returns -1 (error), with errno
>>>  set to ECHILD.  You can achieve the same effect with sigaction by
>>
>> Ok, according to the man page the default is to ignore SIGCHLD, so in
>> other words if I really don't care at all about the info in the data
>> tables I don't need to install a handler that calls wait --- I just wanted
>> to be sure that if I did not fool around with a SIGCHLD handler under
>> freebsd that I wouldn't end up with hundreds on zombie processes waiting.
>
>    Uh, I think you are misunderstanding this. Under FreeBSD, you *must*
> call wait to reap child processes. Ignoring SIGCHLD doesn't let you off
> the hook. The behavior is different under System V, but that isn't
> relavent.

Yes, looking back, I noticed that the text didn't say very much about
the way BSD does it.  Sorry about that.

Greg



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