Re: On SIGCHLD signal semantics

Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@mit.edu)
Fri, 14 Jun 1996 17:18:34 -0400


Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 15:12:24 -0600 (MDT)
From: Marc Aurele La France <Marc.La-France@UAlberta.CA>

It follows that the behaviour that occurs when inheriting a SIGCHLD
handler of SIG_IGN is left as unspecified by both POSIX and the above
spec. It might well be that we are free to decide what we please as to
what that behaviour should be (including crashing the machine if so
decided). This might sound fascetious, but it is according to the "letter
of the law".

Um, no. POSIX specifies that children are supposed to be an exact
duplicate of the parent process. Making children do something
different would be (a) complicated and (b) wrong.

Why are we trying to work so hard to accomodate broken programs? Broken
programs should be fixed, not coddled by adding needless complexity into
the kernel.

- Ted