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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: forking and zombies in SYSV.
Message-ID: <13629@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 20 Aug 90 18:57:31 GMT
References: <1990Aug19.210351.24632@dde.dk> <1990Aug20.133107.12516@lth.se>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <1990Aug20.133107.12516@lth.se> jh@efd.lth.se (Joergen Haegg) writes:
-How do I avoid getting this zombie?
-The only way, am I told, is to let the child fork again and exit.
-The parent will wait() for the first child, but not the child of 
-the first child.
-The second child will not create a zombie, because the parent 
-(the first child) is dead.
-This seems a bit silly, because /etc/init forks all the time and without
-any zombies. (Ok, init is maybe a little special :-)
-Is there not a cleaner way to do this?

No, and your comment about init is more than a bit silly.
init spends most of its time wait()ing for children,
both its own children and orphaned zombies.