[Info-vax] Orphaned processes on OpenVMS

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2011-05-19 15.30, Single Stage to Orbit wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 14:53 -0700, Wendell wrote:
>> One of my biggest aggravations with *nix is the persistence of
>> orphaned processes. Say an app hangs. I log in to another virtual
>> terminal and "kill" it. That leaves various, no longer needed
>> processes still running, and the only way to really clean up is reboot
>> the system. At the worst, these stragglers can interfere with
>> restarting the app I had to kill.
>
> init is supposed to reap those orphaned processes regularly. If it's not
> cleaning up its own mess, something's wrong.

Well, technically, init can't reap an orphaned process. It can only reap 
a dead process, which is when it becomes a zombie. As long as it keeps 
running, init will be the parent, but init will not try to kill it.

If someone kills a parent, however, the children don't necessarily die, 
which is what I suspect the op complained about. VMS is no different. 
Just because you kill one process, the processes it has 
spawned/forked/whatever does not neccesarily also die.

If that was the case, then it would be very hard to create daemons.
But, as with all things, the problem can be solved. You just have to 
write your programs the right way. If they are not, then you as the 
user/sysadm needs to do more work manually.

	Johnny