With all current devel packages, if I launch an xterm, then launch mozilla from in it, then send a kill signal to the xterm process, both it and mozilla dies. Mozilla shouldn't die. I don't think this used to happen, but I could be wrong. jik
Yes, all child processes of a process group leader (eg. your xterm session) must be killed when the leader is killed - this is basic job control behavior, and has worked this way forever - the same happens with konsole / gnome-terminal. To spawn a child process (e.g. mozilla) that becomes its own process group leader, you could do: $ perl -e 'if ( fork() == 0 ) { setpgrp(); exec "/usr/bin/mozilla"; };'