Jeff Trawick wrote:

> William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
> 
>> Wham.  Zombie gone, result code not longer recoverable, if I understand
>> things correctly?
> 
> 
> no, what makes a zombie go away?  this just queries the kernel to see if 
> the pid is valid...  it does not affect the process at all

while a zombie is unaffected, both kill(pid,0) and getpgid(pid) will report 
that the process is alive if it is indeed in zombie state...  probably not a 
good thing for a general purpose are-you-alive function

this didn't hurt mod_cgid's similar logic to test for a script child because 
mod_cgid ensured that it doesn't have to reap status to clean up zombies