45
votes

I'm creating child processes with fork() in C/C++.
When the parent process ends (or is killed for some reason) I want all child processes to be killed as well.
Is that done automatically by the system? Or I have to do it myself?

Thanks.


Pre-existing similar questions:

1
I remember seeing similar questions. E.g. stackoverflow.com/questions/269494/…PolyThinker

1 Answers

54
votes

No. If the parent is killed, children become children of the init process (that has the process id 1 and is launched as the first user process by the kernel).

The init process checks periodically for new children, and waits for them (thus freeing resources that are allocated by their return value).

The question was already discussed with quality answers here: How to make child process die after parent exits?