A process, which does not ignore SIGHUP or any terminal signal, does not terminate when the terminal is closed in a desktop session.  Steps to reproduce : 1.    Open the terminal from GUI 2.    Run this executable as sudo int main () { while(1); return 0; } 3. Close the terminal After step 3, process continues to run. NOTE: When the same steps are run from an SSH Terminal (Putty Session), the process ends when the terminal is closed.