Struct DetachedChild 

pub struct DetachedChild { /* private fields */ }

A minimal handle to a child spawned outside this crate’s kill-on-drop containment via Command::spawn_detached.

Warning — this inverts the crate’s headline guarantee

Everywhere else, processkit guarantees a child — and everything it spawns — dies with its owner (kill-on-drop). A DetachedChild is the crate’s one deliberate exception: the child was launched into its own session (Unix setsid) and is not assigned to this crate’s containment (no Windows Job Object / cgroup / process-group tracking), so dropping this handle does nothing to the child — it keeps running, and its lifetime is now entirely yours to manage.

That is why this is a separate, non-interchangeable type, not a RunningProcess: it deliberately exposes no public kill, wait, timeout, output capture, or teardown/control verbs. All it carries is the child’s pid. On Unix, a private background reaper owns the OS child handle and collects its exit status; this public handle still exposes none of those operations. If you need any of those, you need containment — use Command::start instead and keep the handle.

Not contained by this crate — but a host container may still bind it. spawn_detached deliberately does not break out of an external Job Object / cgroup that already contains your process (a CI runner, a systemd scope, this crate’s own supervisor); doing so would be hostile to whoever set that containment up. So a detached child escapes only this crate’s per-run containment, not a broader host one it inherits.

Implementations

impl DetachedChild

pub fn pid(&self) -> u32

The OS process id of the detached child, as reported at spawn.

The pid can be recycled by the OS once the child exits and the Unix background reaper (or the platform’s normal process cleanup) has collected it. Treat it as a spawn-time identifier, not a durable handle to a still-live process.

Trait Implementations

impl Debug for DetachedChild

fn fmt(&self, f: &mut Formatter<'_>) -> Result

Formats the value using the given formatter.