system call will check whether it's possible to send a signal to it (that
means, to be brief, that the process is owned by the same user, or we are
the super-user). This is a useful way to check that a child process is
-alive and hasn't changed its UID. See L<perlport> for notes on the
-portability of this construct.
+alive (even if only as a zombie) and hasn't changed its UID. See
+L<perlport> for notes on the portability of this construct.
Unlike in the shell, if SIGNAL is negative, it kills
process groups instead of processes. (On System V, a negative I<PROCESS>