Once you fork, it's up to the parent process to decide to wait or not. Most examples show a wait call in the parent after the fork, but it doesn't have to be coded that way. You will need to wait at some point to reap those children though. Otherwise you'll end up with zombie processes. waitpid will let you do non-blocking waits on chidren using the &WNOHANG flag. YMMV on non-UNIX systems.