Re: More loitering process curiosities

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 19:33, W. Michael Petullo wrote:
> But I'm still curious about this process hierarchy.  Why do processes
> like bonobo-activation-server and gnome-panel seem to execute with init
> as their parent?

When doing a fork/exec, GLib programs usually use the g_spawn_ family of
functions; these fork twice, creating an intermediate child process that
immediately exits and is reaped by the parent. The purpose is to avoid
zombies, as usually in a GUI context parent/child doesn't mean much. 
(e.g. say Evolution launches your web browser there's no point really
having the browser be a child of evolution)

Havoc