On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Todd Vierling wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> 
> : What if you don't want to wait() for it? For example, I have a little X
> : app that when I click in it, it forks a new process and then execve()'s a
> : browser (using the URL from the X copy buffer). (It creates a lot of
> : zombies!) I want to wait() for it, but I don't want my parent application
> : to stall until the child closes -- any code examples?

Thanks for the code and suggestions. I fixed my problem with:
(already had sys/types.h)

#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <signal.h>

void
child_signal_handler (int signal)
{
  if (signal == SIGCHLD) {
    int stat;
    while (waitpid (-1, &stat, WNOHANG) > 0);
  }
  return;
}

and before my main loop:

 signal (SIGCHLD, child_signal_handler); 

Also, when I stopped my old (bad) version all the zombies disappeared. (I
guess init cleaned up.)

By the way, I am using execve() -- all the zombies were "sh".
      argv[0] = "xterm";
      argv[1] = "-e";
      argv[2] = "lynx";
      argv[3] = url;
      argv[4] = 0;
      if (execve("/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm", argv, environ)) {

I can't see in the execve(2) manual page any mention of starting a shell.
It seems like the zombie would be "xterm" (not "sh"). Is this because the
xterm is starting "sh"?

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/