How to make child process die after parent exits?

Question

Suppose I have a process which spawns exactly one child process. Now when the parent process exits for whatever reason (normally or abnormally, by kill, ^C, assert failure o

Answer 1

Under POSIX, the exit(), _exit() and _Exit() functions are defined to:

• If the process is a controlling process, the SIGHUP signal shall be sent to each process in the foreground process group of the controlling terminal belonging to the calling process.

So, if you arrange for the parent process to be a controlling process for its process group, the child should get a SIGHUP signal when the parent exits. I'm not absolutely sure that happens when the parent crashes, but I think it does. Certainly, for the non-crash cases, it should work fine.

Note that you may have to read quite a lot of fine print - including the Base Definitions (Definitions) section, as well as the System Services information for exit() and setsid() and setpgrp() - to get the complete picture. (So would I!)