I have addressed the issues brought up by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc except 
for the unit test.  I will get a unit test in tommorrow.  Thank you for 
the feedback.  I have uploaded a new diff file Issue6394-2.diff.

- Should I remove the old diff files?

I ran some test with a parent process that had exited.  The code still 
returned the correct parent process id, even though the process does 
not exist.  I am not sure if process ids get recycled, but I am looking 
in to it.