[plt-scheme] subprocess: double fork() to avoid zombies

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Tue Jul 21 12:28:20 EDT 2009

On Jul 21, Tom Schouten wrote:
> > > The idea being that in a lot of practical cases you don't care about
> > > a child's exit status.  Doing it like this still allows you to shut
> > > down a child by closing its input port, which by most tools is
> > > interpreted as "exit", without ever having to care about zombie
> > > processes caused by not performing wait().
> > 
> > How is this different?  Specifically, you have wait()
> > synchronising on the forking subprocess, but you still need a
> > different wait() for the child that it creates -- no?
> 
> Because the middle process dies before its child, the child is
> inherited by the `init' process.  I believe this is the standard way
> on unix to start a daemon.

Isn't that problematic for getting the exit code?  Can you even wait
for the process after that?  The man entry says that a pid>0 means
"wait for the *child* whose ..."

But in any case, I think that Matthew's solution should work better,
and sounds like it would solve the problem.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!


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