No, the process isn't dead. It isn't alive either. It's a zombie (the process has exited, but the parent hasn't waited on it yet). If you read the manual page on kill, you can read that a kill 0 of a zombified process succeeds. (Basically, what kill 0 does is check if 1) the process exists, and 2) is either owned by us, or we are root).

What you see is expected, and documented behaviour.

In reply to Re: Check if forked process is dead by JavaFan
in thread Check if forked process is dead by petr999

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