A parent process should always be running with N children process. I would like to run a script which will show/kill all children processes that don't have a parent process. ps faux | grep name <pre> root 37140 0.3 0.1 61160 724 /process.pl [child] root 22079 10.2 0.3 127332 64620 /process.pl [master] root 22081 0.3 0.1 84752 26084 \_ /process.pl [child] </pre>