Zombies from forked thread process. Why?

Andrew MacIntyre andymac at bullseye.apana.org.au
Wed Aug 15 19:30:25 EDT 2001


On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Dave Cinege wrote:

> I have a daemon process that watches a directory for files. When
> some appear it decides what to do with them and then spawns a
> processor to handle them. To be speedy it detaches (forks) a processor
> for each 'section'. Eveything run perfect, except that when the processor
> process returns it leaves a zombie in the process tree:
> IE
> root  29065  0.0  0.0  0  0 ?   Z  11:40 0:00 [mss_snort-updat <defunct>]
>
> This is only when invoked by my daemon and not directly by hand.

{...}

Your code doesn't have any waitpid() to retrieve the state of the child
when it terminates (at least what was shown didn't have any)

--
Andrew I MacIntyre                     "These thoughts are mine alone..."
E-mail: andymac at bullseye.apana.org.au  | Snail: PO Box 370
        andymac at pcug.org.au            |        Belconnen  ACT  2616
Web:    http://www.andymac.org/        |        Australia





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