Somebody in the thread at some point said: > 1. Is there any way to get rid of these defunct processes > other than stopping the daemon? If the spawning parent occasionally does a int n; ... waitpid(-1, &n, WNOHANG); then it will clean up the zombies. Like a ghost that cannot go on to the afterlife because it has a terrible secret it must tell someone, the zombies are hanging on grimly so they can whisper their process return code into their parents' ear before finally fading away. > 2. How many of these can pile up before my system crashes? Quite a lot apparently, hundreds at least. -Andy
