It's not that your parent is waiting for the child to finish, but that the Apache server is waiting...

You're absolutely right, I should've said grandparent (from the child's perspective)... Of course it's the Apache process which hangs waiting for the long-running process to close the pipes that were duplicated by the fork.

In reply to Re^3: fork/exe, system open etc. by almut
in thread fork/exe, system open etc. by martino

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