I have spent the past two days ripping out hair trying to figure out how to prevent zombie processes w/the examples above and I just happend to find this in the manual for another lanuage, felt it neccassry to port it here.

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van[at]webfreshener[dot]com
11-Oct-2002 02:53 
 
Forking your PHP daemon will cause it to zombie on exit.

...or so I've seen on:
FreeBSD (PHP4.2.x)
Debian (PHP4.3.0-dev)
Darwin (PHP4.3.0-dev)

This was tested with the example code above and other scripts created for evaluation.

Seems adding <b>--enable-sigchild</b> to your configure will get rid of the problem.

Hope that saves some hair tearing :] 

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Thanks vam@wenfreshener.com !!!!