Killing parent process

[Manoj1]

Hi all,

We usually kill child process. In what scenario Parent process should be killed instead of Child process ?

Thanks,
Manoj

[Dennis Handly · Accepted solution]

One case is when the child is a zombie you need to kill the zombie master.

You may want to kill the parent if the parent will just turn around and create new children.

But as in most cases, it depends.

[Manix]

Generally we dont kill parent as child will be zombie ,we may try to kill parent it its forking to much or may be for abrupt shutdown .

You may read about Zombie in the excellent quote given in the thread below.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/System-Administration/Question-on-defunct-zombie-process-UX/m-p/4004591#M297832

A zombie process is a process which has died and whose parent process is still running and has not wait()ed for it. In other words, if a process becomes a zombie, it means that the parent process has not called wait() or waitpid() to obtain the child process's termination status. Once the parent retrieves a child's termination status, that child process no longer appears in the process table.

You cannot kill a zombie process, because it's already dead. It is taking up space in the process table, and that's about it.

If any process terminates before its children do, init inherits those children. When they die, init calls one of the wait() functions to retrieve the child's termination status, and the child disappears from the process table.

A zombie process is not, in and of itself, harmful, unless there are many of them taking up space in the process table. But it's generally bad programming practice to leave zombies lying around, in the same way
that it's generally a Bad Thing to never bother to free memory you've malloc()ed.
..

[Dennis Handly]

>Manix: Generally we don't kill parent as child will be zombie

No, it becomes an orphan, see glossary(9).

>You may read about Zombie in the excellent quote given in the thread below.

Yes, it does mention orphans and I mention "zombie master".