fork/spawnzombie question

Hi Nathan/Torok... Hey guys... got a bit of a question. I'm playing around with the php/for/pcntl_exec functions and I've got a process that spawns off a bunch of child processes. Unfortunately, I'm getting to where I have 100's of zombie child processes that I can see from the linux/processTBL. I don't want to have my master loop do a waitpid() call, as it would block on the wait for one of the child processes to exit. I recognize that the zombie/child process is essentially a placeholder in the processTBL slt, and really doesn't take up any system resources, but I'd still like to have the zombie processes removed. I'm wondering. Is it possible to fork off a process, and have it essentially do the wait on all the zombie/shild processes from the parent app? Or would this be a peer process, waiting on it's peers? Thanks -bruce bedouglas@earthlink.net 925-249-1844