Forks and Children

While writing a small learning exercise in C, I came across a nifty little concept. The task itself was a common one: I wanted to spawn a subprocess to the background while letting the main process continue to loop.

In most languages you have some facility to group code into a logical unit (a haskell function or a bash subshell) then pass that unit to a command which forks it off into the background for you (haskell’s forkProcess or bash’s simple &).

Forking C 🔗

C takes a far different, but I’d say more elegant, approach. C provides a function, fork() which returns a pid_t.

The beauty of fork() is in its simplicity. All it does is create an exact copy of your program in its current state in memory. That’s it.

int main() {
    pid_t pid;

    pid = fork();

    // ...
}

Guess what, now you’ve got two copies of your running program, both sitting at the exact spot where pid is being assigned the output of fork().

In the copy that was the original (the parent), pid will be the process id of the other copy (the child). And in that child copy, pid will be assigned 0. That’s it; the full extent of fork().

So how do we use this?

Well, let’s say you’ve got a program (as I did) which should sit and loop forever. When some event happens, we want to take some asynchronous action (in my case throw up a dzen notification).

This is the perfect time to use fork(). We’ll let the main thread run continuously, and fork off a child to do its thing when the triggering event occurs.

Here’s a simplified version:

#define _GNU_SOURCE

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main() {
    int ret;
    pid_t pid;

    while (1) {
       /* wait for the "event" */
       ret = some_blocking_process();

       if (ret) {
           /* fork it! */
           pid = fork();

           if (pid == 0) {
               /* we are the child, take action! */
               some_action(ret);
               exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
           }

           /* and the parent loops forever... */
       }
    }
}

So as you can see, the main program waits until some_blocking_process returns an int. If that int is nonzero, we consider that “the event” so we fork to create a copy of ourselves. If pid is zero, we know we are the child process so we take some_action and then simply exit. The parent process will skip that if statement, loop again and wait for some_blocking_process to signal the next event.

Zombie kids 🔗

So I may have lied to you slightly about the simplicity of this approach. The above is all well and good – it is simple – but I ran into a small snag while working with my little learner’s app…

Zombies.

Turns out, when a child process exits, it reports its return value to its parent; like any good child should. The child does this by sending a SIGCHLD signal.

The parent then knows if all or some of its spawned children finished successfully or not. This is important if you’ve got some dependant logic or simply want to log that fact.

In my case, I couldn’t care less. Succeed fail, whatever. I’m done with you kid – go away.

Double turns out, if the parent neglects to act on the signal sent from the dying child, it can remain a zombie.

I think this is poor form. I mean, come on, a negligent parent is no reason to make a process wander around aimlessly as a zombie until the next reboot.

Ok, ok, enough with the metaphor. Bottom line – all you need to do to prevent this is install a simple signal handler which will read (and ignore) the status of the child process in response to said signal.

Here’s our same example, but this time with a simple handler added:

#define _GNU_SOURCE

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>

static void sigchld_handler(int signum) {
    /* this just silences a compiler warning you might get since we 
     * discard the signum parameter that is passed in */
    (void) signum;

    /* the actual handling of the signal... */
    while (waitpid(-1, NULL, WNOHANG) > 0);
}

int main() {
    int ret;
    pid_t pid;

    struct sigaction sig_child;

    sig_child.sa_handler = &sigchld_handler;
    sigemptyset(&sig_child.sa_mask);
    sig_child.sa_flags = 0;
    sigaction(SIGCHLD, &sig_child, NULL);

    while (1) {
       ret = some_blocking_process();

       if (ret) {
           pid = fork();

           if (pid == 0) {
               some_action(ret);
               exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
           }
       }
    }
}

That’s it, no more zombies.

if (fork() == 0) {
    if (fork() == 0) {
        //
        // child logic...
        //

        exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
    }

    exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

wait(0);

//
// continue parent logic...
//