问题 kill - does it kill the process right away? I found my answer and I set up a signal handler for SIGCHLD and introduced wait in that handler. That way, whenever parent process kill s a child process, this handler is called and it calls wait to reap the child. - motive is to clear process table entry. I am still seeing some child processes going for a few seconds even without its parent process dying. - how is this possible? I am seeing this via ps . Precisely ps -o user,pid,ppid,command -ax