Best way to prevent zombie processes

[Cecil Westerhof]

Op Monday 1 Jun 2015 03:03 CEST schreef Cameron Simpson:

> On 31May2015 23:33, Cecil Westerhof <Cecil at decebal.nl> wrote:
>> At the moment I have the following code:
>> os.chdir(directory)
>> for document in documents:
>> subprocess.Popen(['evince', document])
>>
>> With this I can open several documents at once. But there is no way
>> to know when those documents are going to be closed. This
>> could/will lead to zombie processes. (I run it on Linux.) What is
>> the best solution to circumvent this?
>
> The standard trick is to make the process a grandchild instead of a
> child.  Fork, kick off subprocess, exit (the forked child).
>
> But provided you will collect the children eventually then zombies
> are only untidy, not very resource wasteful. They are essentially
> just slots in the process table left around so that exit status can
> be collected; the resources associated with the full process
> (memory, open file, etc) have already been freed.

I do not like untidy. ;-)

But Marko already gave the solution:
    import signal
    signal.signal(signal.SIGCHLD, signal.SIG_IGN)

-- 
Cecil Westerhof
Senior Software Engineer
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilwesterhof