Some questions

Jonathan I. Kamens jik at pit-manager.mit.edu
Mon Jul 2 10:29:39 AEST 1990


  One final note about SIGCHLD signal handlers.... Don Libes has
informed me in E-mail that SunOS 4 is one of the operating systems
under which signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN) will cause dying child processes
to be cleaned up automatically.

  The people with whom I've discussed this in the past have implied
that this feature is a "SysV-derived" feature, but since SunOS is
BSD-derived (or, at least, I *thought* it was), perhaps it's no longer
safe to make that generalization.  I guess the only way to generalize
is to say that vendors which have decided to put this feature in have
done so, and those which haven't, haven't -- check your manual for
more information, or write a program to test it :-).

  However, it's probably still not a good idea to rely on this if
you're trying to write portable code -- you should install a signal
handler of your own, using wait3 if it's available, or wait if it
isn't (or wait4, I guess :-).

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
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