[Gtick-devel] Zombie Invasion

[Simeon Gradinarski]

Hi,
  I discovered gtick two days ago and I find it quite useful for my
guitar practices. But I noticed that it leaves pending zombie
processes. (I should mention I'm running kernel 2.6.9, i386
architecture.)
  It looks like the problem is in util.c, the 'execute' function: it
seems that noone collects the terminated child processes, spawned via
fork call.
  I would propose this piece of code for a fix (and apologize that I
didn't have time to try it myself - there may be an actual reason for
the missing wait ?! ):
 
/*
 * forks and executes given command (with arguments) via sh
 */
void execute(char *command) {
  pid_t result = fork();
  char *argv[] = {"sh", "-c", command, NULL};

/* zombie process fix */
  switch (result)
  {
          case -1: /* error */
                  fprintf(stderr, "Fork error.\n");
                  break;
          case 0: /* we are the child */
                  if (execvp("sh", argv)) 
                  {
                        fprintf(stderr, "Exec error.\n");
                        exit(1);
                  }
                  break;
          default:
                  wait(0);
  }
/* end zombie process fix */
}

Best regards,
 Simeon