only by the parent of the process that is to be terminated. Otherwise, users could
arbitrarily kill each other’s jobs. Note that a parent needs to know the identities
of its children if it is to terminate them. Thus, when one process creates a new
process, the identity of the newly created process is passed to the parent.
A parent may terminate the execution of one of its children for a variety of
reasons, such as these:
• The child has exceeded its usage of some of the resources that it has been
allocated. (To determine whether this has occurred, the parent must have
a mechanism to inspect the state of its children.)
• The task assigned to the child is no longer required.
• The parent is exiting, and the operating system does not allow a child to
continue if its parent terminates.