A funny thing happened to me at the help desk today,...

[Dennis Handly]

>Campbell: Are you telling me that it is impossible to sigkill a parent process and have it's children become zombies?

That's correct. They are orphans not zombies.
But if they already were zombies, killing the zombie master kills the zombies (init reaps them).

>Rob: killed THE parent process

That can't happen anymore, see kill(2).

[Ian Dennison_1]

Reluctantly thread closed. Hopefully it will be of use to interested parties in years to come.

Next discussion thread, what if there a 3rd binary state, not "one" or "zero" but "maybe". Discuss.

[Srimalik]

kill -15 : You request a process to die and do whatever it wants to do before dying the process can also opt to leave as it is free to do "whatever you want to do before dying"
else
If I am serious an want you to really die in any case you will be kill -9ed and won't get any chance to arrange for ur own last rituals.