#: 13651 S10/OS9/6809 (CoCo)
    25-Dec-91  01:48:38
Sb: #13630-#Undead Proci
Fm: Kevin Darling 76703,4227
To: Paul Rinear 73757,1413 (X)

GRIN.  Well, a "DEAD" process is one that's given up all its memory, and all
its paths... the only thing left is a tiny process descriptor holding the error
code (or non-error code :-) about its death.

That's so the parent process can do a Wait call and find out this info if it
wants to.   So until the parent does the Wait (or until the parent itself dies,
in which case the dead child's error code is not needed any more), you'll see
the DEAD notice show up.

If you simply give a command to the shell, he'll fork it off and then Wait. But
if you tell the shell to put the command in the background, he'll fork it off
and NOT Wait to see what happened, but instead go ahead and get another command
line from you.

In a nutshell, that's why you had to tell the shell to wait ("w").  By forking
off other commands (like the deiniz which errored out) you were allowing the
shell to wait once (which would pick up on one dead child), but then shell
didn't know about the new dead guy you had just generated. More or less luck
that he'd pick up on it after a coupla times :-)

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