Need help spawning a child

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <873 at cbnewsl.ATT.COM> dune at cbnewsl.ATT.COM (Greg
Pasquariello) writes:

>Simply use signal() to ingnore the death of a child.  In SVR3.2 this will
>have the desired effect of letting the child die without creating
>zombies.

I can't speak for SVR3.2, but I can tell you for sure that this will
not work under BSD (in fact, I just checked with a five line program).
The method I use under BSD to accomplish this is a bit more
convoluted, but it just *might* be a bit more portable (I'm not sure,
because I've done very little work under anything other than BSD and
the SysV machine I have an account on is down right now :-).

Under BSD, you set up a signal handler which responds to SIGCHLD by
calling wait(0).  The return value of the wait() call is irrelevant --
it serves only to tell the kernel that it can free up the resources
reserved for the zombie child.

#include <signal.h>

main()
{
   ...
   signal(SIGCHLD, handler);
   ...
}

handler()
{
   wait(0);
}

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
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