From: David Corbin <dcorbin@...>
Date: 2002-05-05T22:13:12+09:00
Subject: defunct child process

I've got ruby application, running on Linux.  It creates a child process 
(fork/exec) with a pipe for the childs's stdout, spawns a thread to read 
from the pipe, and then proceeds to do so.  If the child runs to 
completion, rather than "going away", it remains in the process lists as 
<defunct>.  

What's the correct way to clean this up?  What's the best way to know 
that a particular child process has completed?

Thanks
David