how do I remove the defunct processes when login or chat

[Will Thompson]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 06:09:41PM +0800, pencil 磊 wrote:
> I execute lt-nullclient program of pidgin, When I login, there will be a 
> lot of defunct processes will be created, and destroyed only lt-nullclient 
> return.

In telepathy-haze, I cured this by ignoring SIGCHLD:

    #include <signal.h>

    /* meanwhile, somewhere in a block of initialization code */
        signal (SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN);

Alternatively, you could attach a signal handler which uses waitpid to
reap your zombie children.  (I strongly suspect that this is more
correct than ignoring the signal, but I got into infinitely recursive
signal handle loops when I made a stab at it.)  Take a look at `man 3
signal`, `man 3 waitpid` and `man 7 signal.h`.

It's a bit of a shame that dnsquery.c doesn't do this itself, but I
guess that if the UI wanted to fork processes and listen for SIGCHLD it
would be harmful to have the DNS code catching the signal.  People with
strong Unix signal-fu: is there any way that
purple_dnsquery_{resolved,failed} could reliably reap the child without
having to block?

Will
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