How to detect parent process is killed?

[jason williams]

I have a process which spawned a child process performing some tasks. But a problem happens when parent process is killed (by calling e.g. kill <pid>), the child process becomes an orphan. I test to use jps checking if parent process still exists or not, but it doesn't take effect. How would be the right way to check if parent process is killed and stop child process?

Thanks

[Greg Brannon]

Why, under what circumstances, is the parent process being killed?