On 07/25/2012 02:14 PM, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 09:59:28AM +0200, Michael Haubenwallner wrote: >> OTOH, AFAICT, as long as a PID isn't waitpid()ed for, it isn't reused by >> fork(). >> However, I'm unable to find that in the POSIX spec. > > A process that hasn't been waited for should become a zombie, which > should be sufficient to prevent its PID being reused. Are you saying > that AIX and Interix don't have zombies?
Nope. My thought was that bash eventually could postpone waiting for a specific child PID until required by the driving shell script. That is: immediately for synchronous childs to set $?, and on "wait" for asynchronous childs. The idea was to render storing CHILD_MAX returnvalues obsolete. However, I'm investigating why respecting CHILD_MAX by bash doesn't work when the kernel starts reusing PIDs after CHILD_MAX different ones. /haubi/
