I am in the process of writing a little library to control the interaction of a parent program with any child processes that it spawns. Would there be any interest in such a library here? Assuming that there would, please excuse me diving in at the deep end. I'm currently mulling over how best to ensure that system resources are cleaned up automatically when the child exits and would value some advice. Under unix, I've defined a handler for SIGCHLD signals. The handler does two things only: * reaps the zombie * stores the return status in a std::map<pid_t, int> completed_children; variable. Each time a new child is spawned, the pid of the child process is registered in the map, so the handler needs do nothing other than find the entry. namespace { std::map<pid_t, int> completed_children; int status; sig_atomic_t pid; } extern "C" void child_handler(int) { pid = wait(&status); std::map<pid_t, int>::iterator it = completed_children.find(pid); if (it != completed_children.end()) it->second = status; } I'm pretty sure that the above is safe code. It does the absolute minimum in the handler routine. wait() is guaranteed to be async-safe. Moreover, the handler receives only SIGCHLD signals and so cannot receive multiple calls simultaneaously. However, I'm unsure whether it Ok to search the map like this. Any advice? My one other worry is that the SIGCHLD handler could be redefined elsewhere in the code, but AFAICS there's nothing that I can do about that. Furthermore, it means only that the user of my Child library won't be able to ascertain the exit status of child processes launched using it. (If the zombie is reaped elsewhere then a subsequent call to waitpid(pid, &status, WNOHANG); will result in errno being set to ECHILD. Ie, I'll know that the child process has ended but just won't know its exit status.) Under windows, I'm proposing to use a separate thread to wait() for each child process. This seems to be the standard way of dealing with the problem, but I'm a total novice when it comes to Windows programming so know only what I've read. Again, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Angus