Re: Q: avoiding zombies

From: Juha Laiho (Juha.Laiho_at_iki.fi)
Date: 06/16/04

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    Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 16:47:02 GMT

    "James Lehman" <james[remove]@akrobiz.com> said:
    >I have written a daemon-like process that controls tape drives.
    ...
    >I want to be able to start and stop the processes from a CGI application.
    >The processes need to run as root, so I came up with an idea of running
    >another
    >process that does nothing more than wait for the other end of a fifo to
    >be opened and written to.
    ...
    >It works great, except I get a lot of pesky zombies in my process table.
    >How do I eliminate this?

    Your daemon process either has to install a signal handler for SIGCHLD
    in which it calls wait(2)/waitpid(2) for its dead child processes, or
    explicitly ignore SIGCHLD signals. See NOTES section at the end of
    wait(2) manual page.

    I think this is also covered in comp.unix.programmer FAQ material. 

    -- 
Wolf  a.k.a.  Juha Laiho     Espoo, Finland
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