Yeah, their zombie process argument is weak. In theory, you are vulnerable because you've eliminated the zombie reaping mechanism. In practice, the fact that

Yeah, their zombie process argument is weak. In theory, you are vulnerable because you've eliminated the zombie reaping mechanism. In practice, the fact that you're running only one application allows you to make lots of simplifying assumptions so you can avoid getting into this situation quite easily. Just stick with a model where parents never exit before children (and always reap children). You don't need an adoptive parent if you never create orphans. And even if it did happen, the resource consumption is tiny. Zombie processes free all their memory, close all their files, etc. The only remainder is a small data structure necessary to support stuff like the wait() call returning the process's exit status.