The orphaned process does not pose any problem; there is another scenario with the distinct possibility of a nasty problem arising out of it.
Consider this scenario: a process forks, the parent and child are alive and running their individual code paths in parallel. Let's say the parent's PID is 100 and the child's is 102, implying the child's PPID is 100 of course.
Now we delve into a further level of detail: the parent process is supposed to wait upon the termination of its children (via any of the available wait*(2) APIs of course); what if it does not? Ah, this is really the bad case.
Imagine this scenario: the child process terminates, but the parent is not waiting (blocking) upon it; thus it continues to execute its code. The ...
