Defunct Processes

[uunet!bria!mike]

In an article, sun.com!iis!venkat writes:
|I am sure this question was asked several times but I did not keep track
|of it. I have a daemon process which forks out to do various tasks and 
|also notices the termination of its children by doing a
|   signal(SIGCHLD, function)
|However when I do a ps, I find several defunct processes, apparently
|children of my daemon process. How do I prevent such processes being in the
|system? What exactly is a defunct process. I am running my processes on a
|Sun 4. Thanks.

A defunct process is a process that has exited but it's parent has not
called wait() to get it's exit status.  Somewhere in your function, you
need to call wait().
-- 
Michael Stefanik                       | Opinions stated are not even my own.
Systems Engineer, Briareus Corporation | UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
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