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I'm seeing some strange screen behavior on OSX. When I quit screen, child processes are not killed.

$ screen
$ tail -f (or some long running process inside screen)

Then, I kill the current screen window with ^a k or terminate screen entirely with ^a ^\ and it appears everything went well:

$ [screen is terminating]

However, tail -f is still running (with a PPID of 1). Why is it orphaned instead of killed? Is there a setting/flag that alters this behavior? I've tried this under Ubuntu and screen behaves as expected.

Thanks!

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  • It works as expected for me under OS X 10.6. Are you running /usr/bin/screen, or some other installed version?
    – malcolmpdx
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 21:42
  • Yep, /usr/bin/screen and I tried with/without a .screenrc
    – joepestro
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 21:44
  • Has tail become a zombie or something like that? Theoretically once you close the screen, its tty dies and tail will loose its stdio and just die. If it hasn't died, it might be waiting for some kernel space stuff to be cleared.
    – billc.cn
    Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 1:30
  • That's what I thought too, but tail doesn't go away. I don't think they're zombies, because I can kill them fine (and they are still running with a parent PID of 1).
    – joepestro
    Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 17:45
  • I ran into the same issue and switched to tmux, which does not have this issue.
    – Martin J.H.
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 13:34

1 Answer 1

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I've seen where a pseudo-terminal's process will remain until it receives input. To test this case, after you see the lingering process in the ps list, send a wall and a short message. The process should then disappear.

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