Orphan Process

A process whose parent process no more exists i.e. either finished or terminated without waiting for its child process to terminate is called an orphan process. 

In the following code, parent finishes execution and exits while the child process is still executing and is called an orphan process now.

However, the orphan process is soon adopted by init process, once its parent process dies.

// A C program to demonstrate Orphan Process. // Parent process finishes execution while the // child process is running. The child process // becomes orphan. #include<stdio.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <unistd.h> int main() {     // Create a child process          int pid = fork();     if (pid > 0)     printf("in parent process");     // Note that pid is 0 in child process     // and negative if fork() fails     else if (pid == 0)     {         sleep(30);         printf("in child process");     }     return 0; }