To answer your questions, yes it is possible for short-lived processes to never show up. In fact it is very unlikely that a short lived process will show up in ps or top. Those programs read the process table with techniques that are almost as fast as a memory to memory data move. Once they have this snapshot, they prepare a report. top repeats this every n seconds, but top presents you with a program...it does not want to show all processes, just the "top" ones. You have a better shot with ps. A short-lived process can be gone in well under a tenth of a second.... let's say that yours is lasting exactly one tenth of a second... That means that ps must capture a process table snapshot sometime during that tenth of a second. This is very hard to arrange in a reliable fashion. A very clever wrapper program that runs both ps and your program nearly simultaneously might be able to do it.

But if the program shows up in glance but not ps/top, I tend to suspect something else. It could be that the program is destroying it's command line. You might try: ps -el and see if it shows up.