#: 6415 S14/misc/info/Soapbox
    31-Aug-90  02:51:33
Sb: #6410-#dead procs
Fm: James Jones 76257,562
To: Joseph Cheek 76264,142 (X)

No, you don't have to wait immediately.  GShell probably does, though, and if
you type a command at the shell and *don't* terminate it with "&", then the
shell will F$Wait.  However, at *some* point, an F$Wait is a polite thing to
do--do you really have an application in which the parent doesn't care whether
the child succeeded or not?

A child process in the DEAD state has all its resources save for the process
descriptor given back to the system, so it's not using very much memory--but
process descriptors *are* a finite resource, so a parent process should check
on its children at least once in a while.  (Is this a pain?  Perhaps, but I
can't think of any scheme that would let a process find out the exit status of
its children and consume zero memory doing it.)

There are 2 Replies.