Quote:
Originally Posted by
Corona688
One odd thing I've discovered with firefox and flash is that programs it launches also inherit an open sound device! if firefox is hogging the sound device, and firefox launches xpdf, and you close firefox completely, xpdf will still hog it! It is very bizarre.
It's not too strange if you think about how open file handles interact with fork/exec... Basically when you fork a process, the new process normally inherits all the file descriptors of the first process - and the file descriptors stay open when you call exec(), too. There are ways around this (flagging a file descriptor "close on exec", or explicitly closing the file after a fork()) - I guess firefox just hasn't implemented them, or something...