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

Historically, from UNIX v7, the process system has detected orphanity of processes by checking a process' parent id. As I say, historically, the init(8) system process is a special process by only one reason: It cannot die. It cannot die because the kernel algorithm to deal with assigning a new parent process id, depends on this fact. when a process executes its exit(2) call (by means of a process system call or by external task as sending it a signal or the like) the kernel reassigns all children of this process the id of the init process as their parent process id. This leads to the most easy test, and most portable way of knowing if a process has got orphan. Just check the result of the getppid(2) system call and if it is the process id of the init(2) process then the process got orphan before the system call.

Two issues emerge from this approach that can lead to issues:

• first, we have the possibility of changing the init process to any user process, so How can we assure that the init process will always be parent of all orphan processes? Well, in the exit system call code there's a explicit check to see if the process executing the call is the init process (the process with pid equal to 1) and if that's the case, the kernel panics (It should not be able anymore to maintain the process hierarchy) so it is not permitted for the init process to do an exit(2) call.
• second, there's a race condition in the basic test exposed above. Init process' id is assumed historically to be 1, but that's not warranted by the POSIX approach, that states (as exposed in other response) that only a system's process id is reserved for that purpose. Almost no posix implementation does this, and you can assume in original unix derived systems that having 1 as response of getppid(2) system call is enough to assume the process is orphan. Another way to check is to make a getppid(2) just after the fork and compare that value with the result of a new call. This simply doesn't work in all cases, as both call are not atomic together, and the parent process can die after the fork(2) and before the first getppid(2) system call. The processparent id only changes once, when its parent does anexit(2)call, so this should be enough to check if thegetppid(2)result changed between calls to see that parent process has exit. This test is not valid for the actual children of the init process, because they are always children ofinit(8)`, but you can assume safely these processes as having no parent either (except when you substitute in a system the init process)