waste of resources ?

[Bryan VanDeVen]

Arne Mueller wrote:

> 
> Im running python 1.5.2b2 on SGI power challange irix64 version 6.5.
> Everytime a child process is created via fork(), it realy does it's job
> but never dies, instead the number of zombie processes (as reported by
> the 'top' program) steadily increases, though I call the sys.exit(0)
> method for the child. Any idea how exit a process without creating a
> zombie?

On sysV or Unix98 systems you may set the disposition of SIGCHLD to
SIG_IGN (i.e., ignore death or a child signals)  The watertight method
is to catch SIGCHLD and have the handler call waitpid(...) with WNOHANG
in a loop.

-- 
Bryan Van de Ven
Applied Research Labs
University of Texas, Austin