Some questions

[Don Libes]

In article <1990Jul1.213022.26393 at athena.mit.edu> jik at pit-manager.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
>  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 :-).

Guy Harris has informed me that I was wrong about signal(SIGCHLD,SIG_IGN)
reaping child processes automatically on SunOS.  He is correct.

I had the unfortunate luck to be calling a subroutine that someone
else wrote which did the old wait in a loop trick, making me believe
that this long-standing behavior had been changed on my system.

Jonathon was right, originally.  SunOS 4.1 works the way that BSD
systems have worked all along.  Sorry Jonathan.

Don Libes          libes at cme.nist.gov      ...!uunet!cme-durer!libes