And if you dare take the risk of lobbing a SIGCHLD at the parent process, most of the time, that doesn’t even do anything, and now you’ve been through the stress of signalling a perfectly healthy parent process.
I like to analogise and anthropomorphise signals, but there’s no non-depressing way to do this one. SIGCHLD is basically “clean up after your kids, even if that means tidying their corpses away”.
Often the parent can’t do that or doesn’t know how. It’s hugging them close and they’ll only leave once the parent also leaves.
These things aren’t even sentient and that stings a bit.
The way I look at it, parent processes know they will outlast their children unless they deliberately turn them into daemons, traditionally by double forking them. Daemons live on, even when the parent dies.
And if you dare take the risk of lobbing a SIGCHLD at the parent process, most of the time, that doesn’t even do anything, and now you’ve been through the stress of signalling a perfectly healthy parent process.
I like to analogise and anthropomorphise signals, but there’s no non-depressing way to do this one. SIGCHLD is basically “clean up after your kids, even if that means tidying their corpses away”.
Often the parent can’t do that or doesn’t know how. It’s hugging them close and they’ll only leave once the parent also leaves.
These things aren’t even sentient and that stings a bit.
Here’s how I personify the Linux kernel:
Well, that’s just bleak.
The way I look at it, parent processes know they will outlast their children unless they deliberately turn them into daemons, traditionally by double forking them. Daemons live on, even when the parent dies.
Fork them kids