How do I exec() a process in the background in C?
c, exec, process
Solution
Catch SIGCHLD and in the the handler, call wait().
Some flavors of Posix (I think *BSD, but don't quote me on that), if you ignore SIGCHLD, the kernel will automatically clean up zombie process (which is what you are seeing in ps). It's a nice feature but not portable.
Problem
I've done a fork and exec() on a process, but I'd like to run it in the background. How can I do this? I can just avoid calling waitpid on it, but then the process sits there for ever, waiting to return it's status to the parent. Is there some other way to do this?