Orphan process

An orphan process is a computer process whose parent process has finished or terminated, though itself remains running.

In a Unix-like operating system any orphaned process will be immediately adopted by the special init system process. This operation is called re-parenting and occurs automatically. Even though technically the process has the "init" process as its parent, it is still called an orphan process since the process that originally created it no longer exists.

A process can be orphaned unintentionally, such as when the parent process terminates or crashes. The process group mechanism in most Unix-like operation systems can be used to help protect against accidental orphaning, where in coordination with the user's shell will try to terminate all the child processes with the SIGHUP process signal, rather than letting them continue to run as orphans.

A process may also be intentionally orphaned so that it becomes detached from the user's session and left running in the background; usually to allow a long-running job to complete without further user attention, or to start an indefinitely running service. Under Unix, the latter kinds of processes are typically called daemon processes. The Unix nohup command is one means to accomplish this.

With remote invocation, a server process is also said to be orphaned when the client that initiated the request unexpectedly crashes after making the request while leaving the server process running. These orphaned processes waste server resources and can potentially leave a server starved for resources. However there are several solutions to the orphan process problem:

1. Extermination is the most commonly used technique; in this case the orphan is killed.
2. Reincarnation is a technique in which machines periodically try to locate the parents of any remote computations; at which point orphaned processes are killed.
3. Expiration is a technique where each process is allotted a certain amount of time to finish before being killed. If need be a process may "ask" for more time to finish before the allotted time expires.

See also

• Zombie process
• Daemon process