it does becomes an orphan process. Such situations are typically handled with a special "root" (or "init") process, which is assigned as the new parent of a process when its parent process exits. This special process detects when an orphan process terminates and then retrieves its exit status, allowing the system to deallocate the terminated child process. If a child process receives a signal, a waiting parent will then continue execution leaving an orphan process behind. Hence it is sometimes needed to check the argument set by wait, waitpid or waitid and, in the case that WIFSIGNALED is true, wait for the child process again to deallocate resources. See also exit (system call) fork (system call) Spawn (computing) Wait (command) References Process (computing) C POSIX library System calls