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

If parent dies, PPID of orphans change to 1 - you only need to check your own PPID. In a way, this is polling, mentioned above. here is shell piece for that:

check_parent () {
      parent=`ps -f|awk '$2=='$PID'{print $3 }'`
      echo "parent:$parent"
      let parent=$parent+0
      if [[ $parent -eq 1 ]]; then
        echo "parent is dead, exiting"
        exit;
      fi
}


PID=$$
cnt=0
while [[ 1 = 1 ]]; do
  check_parent
  ... something
done