os/exec: documentation unclear on whether (*Cmd).Wait must be called

[bcmills]

On POSIX platforms, a C program that uses fork to spawn a child process must subsequently call wait or similar to reap any resulting zombies. However, the call to wait is not needed if the process explicitly sets the handler for SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN or sets the SA_NOCLDWAIT flag on that handler.

On those same platforms, Go's os/exec package uses fork under the hood (via os.StartProcess, syscall.StartProcess, and ultimately syscall.forkExec). However, (*exec.Cmd).Start doesn't document whether Wait must actually be called. The documentation today says:

The Wait method will return the exit code and release associated resources once the command exits.

That seems to imply that Wait must be called in order to release those resources, but that isn't entirely obvious to me — given the finalizers that the standard library already uses for os.File, one might assume that the child process does not need to be explicitly reaped if the caller doesn't care about the exit code and hasn't allocated explicit resources that would need to be released (for example, because they set Stdin, Stdout, and/or Stderr to either nil or instances of *os.File).

I think that (*exec.Cmd).Start should either clearly state that Wait must always be called (and perhaps diagnose violations with a finalizer), or avoid unbounded resource leaks if Wait is not called.

I think the latter is fairly easy to implement at the cost of one extra goroutine per Cmd (by moving the Wait call into an eager goroutine), and that would also enable a clean fix for #28461 (#15103 notwithstanding).

@ianlancetaylor, @bradfitz: does that seem like a reasonable resolution?

[bcmills]

I will note that at the moment, (*exec.Cmd) instances allocated via exec.Command do not leak goroutines by default, while those allocated via exec.CommandContext do.

(Compare https://go.dev/play/p/mNn6W6J9iDZ vs. https://go.dev/play/p/OQc3BPJfSBQ.)

[bcmills]

(This was noticed while prototyping an in-tree implementation of #50436.)

[ianlancetaylor]

The docs for the Wait method also say "Wait releases any resources associated with the Cmd." I think it would be fine to explicitly require callers to call Wait themselves, especially since that is how it already works.

My main concern with a simple approach to automatically waiting is that it uses up more than a goroutine, it uses up a thread. I don't think we want to burn a thread per child process automatically and unnecessarily. We could in principle use a SIGCHLD handler to minimize threads, but I'm not sure it's worth the potential collisions with C code--upon receiving a SIGCHLD we would have to check the status of only subprocesses started by os/exec, to avoid confusion with C code waiting for subprocesses started by C code.

[magical]

Just chiming into say that i had this exact question recently. More guidance from the docs would certainly be appreciated 😄

In my case, i was reading output from a command. When i was done with the portion i was interested in, i didn't care what happened to the process, just that it went away. Ended up deferring Process.Kill followed by Wait. I don't know if the Wait was really necessary but i figured it couldn't hurt.

cmd := exec.Command("ndisasm", "...")
pipe, err := cmd.StdoutPipe()
if err != nil {
        t.Fatal(err)
}
defer func() { cmd.Process.Kill(); cmd.Wait() }()
defer pipe.Close()
cmd.Start()