Child process - listen for event when parent dies

Question

I have a detached child process. It knows its parent's pid. Is there some way on both MacOS and Linux that I can listen for when the parent process exits, from the child process?

I need to make a call to delete a lockfile from the child, when the parent process dies.

I am looking for a solution that does not require polling.

I heard that waitid() might do it. I have this small program that compiles on MacOS with gcc, but it exits with code 255 - my only guess is that this is because waitid() won't work with processes that aren't child process of the current process?

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    pid_t pid = atoi(argv[1]);
    printf("pid = %jd\n", (intmax_t) pid);
    siginfo_t sig;
    return waitid(P_PID, pid, &sig, WEXITED|WNOWAIT);
}

Answer 1

On MacOS, the following actually has the behavior I am looking for (and possibly doesn't use polling?)

https://github.com/brainopener/mac-pid-waiter

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/event.h>

int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {

    pid_t pid;    
    if(argc!=2 || (pid=atoi(argv[1]))<=0)
    {
        fprintf(stderr,"USAGE\nwaiter pid\n");
        return 1;
    }

    int kq=kqueue();
    if (kq == -1) {
        fprintf(stderr,"kqueue returned -1.");
    return 1;
    }

    struct kevent ke;    
    EV_SET(&ke, pid, EVFILT_PROC, EV_ADD, NOTE_EXIT, 0, NULL);

    if (kevent(kq, &ke, 1, NULL, 0, NULL)<0) {
        fprintf(stderr,"kevent failed.");
    return 1;
    }


    for(;;) {
        memset(&ke,0,sizeof(struct kevent));
        if(kevent(kq, NULL, 0, &ke, 1, NULL)<0){
            fprintf(stderr,"kevent failed.");
        return 1;
        }

        if (ke.fflags & NOTE_EXIT)
        break;
    }

    return 0;
}