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fc337d84

Member

Registered: 2018-04-24

Posts: 1

[i3 + dmenu] Process tree

Hello everyone,

I've been using i3 for a week now, and everything is going fine. It's easy to use and to configure.

I use dmenu to launch applications and I've noticied that they all have zsh as their parent process.

Considering that they are not affected by the death of their parent zsh process, I wonder if it's normal behavior, or if I've never noticied this before, as I don't understand why it's necessary to launch multiple instances of zsh just to launch other applications.

~% pstree
systemd─┬─agetty
        ├─dbus-daemon
        ├─i3bar───i3status
        ├─login───zsh───startx───xinit─┬─Xorg───4*[{Xorg}]
        │                              └─i3
        ...
        ├─xterm───zsh───pstree
        ├─zsh───thunderbird───46*[{thunderbird}]
        ├─zsh───firefox─┬─Web Content───25*[{Web Content}]
        │               ├─Web Content───22*[{Web Content}]
        │               └─67*[{firefox}]
        ├─zsh───rstudio─┬─rsession───5*[{rsession}]
        │               └─9*[{rstudio}]
        └─zsh───okular───2*[{okular}]

Can anybody give me some insight about this?

Best regards

nesk

Member

Registered: 2011-03-31

Posts: 187

Re: [i3 + dmenu] Process tree

I'll give you hints instead of an answer so you can find it yourself
Check how i3 invokes dmenu and man dmenu.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,522

Website

Re: [i3 + dmenu] Process tree

Another related hint, look up `exec` in your shell documentation.  Notably it is not only the dmenu processes that have a needless zsh process still running, but X itself still have zsh as a parent.  It would appear you just run `startx` to start X not `exec startx`.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman