Properly spawning a detached process requires double forking in order to avoid zombie processes: http://www.linuxjedi.co.uk/2014/02/why-use-double-fork-to-daemonize.html I did not see this happening in https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/libnative/io/process.rs cc @aturon @alexcrichton