How to make child process die after parent exits?

Question

Suppose I have a process which spawns exactly one child process. Now when the parent process exits for whatever reason (normally or abnormally, by kill, ^C, assert failure o

Answer 1

This solution worked for me:

• Pass stdin pipe to child - you don't have to write any data into the stream.
• Child reads indefinitely from stdin until EOF. An EOF signals that the parent has gone.
• This is foolproof and portable way to detect when the parent has gone. Even if parent crashes, OS will close the pipe.

This was for a worker-type process whose existence only made sense when the parent was alive.