The urxvtd service

As part of setting up user configuration, for every "real-person" user the external formats import subsystem generates a user-level service bundle that runs urxvtd, the dæmon that displays terminal emulations on X displays in response to urxvtc.

This dæmon is set up to run local-reaper to mark itself as a "local reaper" program. This is possible because urxvtd is happy to handle reaping orphaned child processes that it did not fork itself.

This is done purely in order to make the process tree look better to users running ps -a -x -d or similar.

The visible consequences of this are that programs that are run from within urxvt terminal sessions that fork-and-exit-parent (for whatever reason) are reparented in the process tree to have the urxvtd as their parent. Without this "local reaper" setting, they would be reparented to the per-user service-manager instance that spawned the urxvtd dæmon, making them appear as if they were also service processes.