UNIX question

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

> My question: Is there any way to kill off these zombies so I can get
> 	     more processes ?  Or, failing that, is there any other
> 	     way to do what I want ?

Sure, have the parent wait() on terminated children.
If for some reason you have to avoid blocking, you
could have the wait() done in a SIGCLD signal handler.
Or, you could keep track of the child PIDs and probe
their state every so often via kill() with "signal" 0,
waiting on those that return failure from the kill().