up vote 2 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I'm seeing some strange screen behavior on OSX. When I quit screen, child processes are not killed.

$ screen
$ tail -f (or some long running process inside screen)

Then, I kill the current screen window with ^a k or terminate screen entirely with ^a ^\ and it appears everything went well:

$ [screen is terminating]

However, tail -f is still running (with a PPID of 1). Why is it orphaned instead of killed? Is there a setting/flag that alters this behavior? I've tried this under Ubuntu and screen behaves as expected.

Thanks!

link|improve this question
It works as expected for me under OS X 10.6. Are you running /usr/bin/screen, or some other installed version? – malcolmpdx Jan 26 at 21:42
Yep, /usr/bin/screen and I tried with/without a .screenrc – joepestro Jan 26 at 21:44
Has tail become a zombie or something like that? Theoretically once you close the screen, its tty dies and tail will loose its stdio and just die. If it hasn't died, it might be waiting for some kernel space stuff to be cleared. – billc.cn Jan 27 at 1:30
That's what I thought too, but tail doesn't go away. I don't think they're zombies, because I can kill them fine (and they are still running with a parent PID of 1). – joepestro Jan 27 at 17:45
feedback

migrated from serverfault.com Jan 26 at 21:39

This question came from our site for system administrators and desktop support professionals.

Know someone who can answer? Share a link to this question via email, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.