Question on fork(), exec(), kill()

[BURNS]

in article <16177 at smoke.brl.mil>, gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) says:

> In article <1991May15.201821.15350 at colorado.edu> farnham at spot.Colorado.EDU (Farnham David) writes:
>>I don't seem to have any problem killing the child, but after several
>>iterations I run out of process space and I can no longer fork().

> Sure -- processes continue to occupy slots in the process table,
> and thus are counted against your process limit, until they are
> successfully wait()ed on.  Kill()ing them just makes zombies out
> of the processes; wait() lays them to rest.

If the SIG_DFL for SIGCHLD is to discard the signal, why do you HAVE to
wait for the child? The only time I've had to wait under HP-UX for a child
is to guard against *transient* peaks of numbers of children - they would
eventually die anyway. Is this a SYSV/BSD diff? Thanx.
-- 
BURNS,JIM (returned student & Technology Dynamics staff member, an ATDC co.)
Georgia Institute of Technology, 30178 Georgia Tech Station,
Atlanta Georgia, 30332            | Internet: gt0178a at prism.gatech.edu
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