If I just run sleep 1 & in bash, the sleep process will get reaped almost instantly after it dies. This happens whether job control is enabled or disabled. Is there a way I can make bash hold off on reaping the process until I do something like wait or fg? E.g.:
sleep 1 & sleep 2 ps -ef | grep defunct # I want this to show the sleep 1 process wait ps -ef | grep defunct # But now it should be gone I'm not sure why you would want to, but you can interpose another process to reap the child, then pause that process so it cannot handle the SIGCHLD signal. Eg:
bash -c 'sleep 1 & kill -STOP $$' & pid=$! sleep 2 ps -ef|grep defunct ps f kill -CONT $pid The ps f output showing the T and Z states would be
8023 pts/2 S+ 0:00 \_ /bin/bash mytest 8024 pts/2 T+ 0:00 \_ bash -c sleep 1 & kill -STOP $$ 8026 pts/2 Z+ 0:00 | \_ [sleep] <defunct> 8029 pts/2 R+ 0:00 \_ ps f 
bash -c '(kill -STOP $$; exec sleep 1) & wait' &
sleep 1? Isn't it normal that it will be gone after one second?wait()to fetch the exit status of the child. Before that happens, the dead process is still lying around in the process list as a so-called zombie process. You usually don't see them, since most programs that fork children just clean them up immediately.