When a parent process is killed by “kill -9”, will subprocess also be killed?

Question

One of my colleague told me this morning, when he killed supervisord by \"kill -9\", the subprocesses of supervisord is not killed.

He is quite sure about that, but I

Answer 1

No, child processes are not necessarily killed when the parent is killed.

However, if the child has a pipe open which it is writing to and the parent is reading from, it will get a SIGPIPE when it next tries to write to the pipe, for which the default action is to kill it. That is often what happens in practice.