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In most systems, a parent process can create an independently executing child process. The parent process may then issue a wait system call, which suspends the execution of the parent process while the child executes. When the child process terminates, it returns an exit status to the operating system, which is then returned to the waiting ...
In Unix-like operating systems, every process except process 0 (the swapper) is created when another process executes the fork() system call. The process that invoked fork is the parent process and the newly created process is the child process. Every process (except process 0) has one parent process, but can have many child processes.
When a child process terminates before the parent has called wait, the kernel retains some information about the process, such as its exit status, to enable its parent to call wait later. [3] Because the child is still consuming system resources but not executing it is known as a zombie process .
If the parent chooses to wait for the child to die, then the parent will receive the exit code of the program that the child executed. To prevent the child becoming a zombie the parent should call wait on its children, either periodically or upon receiving the SIGCHLD signal, which indicates a child process has terminated.
In Unix and other POSIX-compatible systems, the parent process can retrieve the exit status of a child process using the wait() family of system calls defined in wait.h. [10] Of these, the waitid() [11] call retrieves the full exit status, but the older wait() and waitpid() [12] calls retrieve only the least significant 8 bits of the exit status.
A shooting in a Nashville high school cafeteria Wednesday left a female student dead and another student wounded, nearly two years after another deadly school shooting in the city that ignited an ...
However, the process's entry in the process table remains. The parent can read the child's exit status by executing the wait system call, whereupon the zombie is removed. The wait call may be executed in sequential code, but it is commonly executed in a handler for the SIGCHLD signal, which the parent receives whenever a child has died.
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