This does not wait for all children to finish. It processes multiple children from the same SIG CHLD signal if they are "ready". If the parent "dies", then you as a child eventually get this CHLD signal and you get removed from the process table. This is a non-blocking situation, that's what WNOHANG does - it doesn't "hang up" waiting for anybody. If say 3 of 20 children have CHLD signal at the same time, then you have to process those 3 children at once. After that, then the other 17 is a different story. So no, this will not "hang" and wait for all children to finish. This just says, "hey at least one and maybe more than one children" are in CHLD signal state". "At least one" does not mean "all", and it doesn't mean wait for all children to be in CHLD signal state!

Ok, then if you are launching servers that spawn other child processes, then you should keep track of the PID's or names of those things. If you have permission level that allows you to kill that server, then its children will also be killed if you have right signal handling installed.

In reply to Re^3: automatically killing all child processes created in a script by Marshall
in thread automatically killing all child processes created in a script by swartz

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