On Thu, 22 May 2008, Glen Holcomb wrote:

> Always Kill You Children!
Not really.

The perlfunc man page said it best...

                If you "fork" without ever waiting on your children,
                you will accumulate zombies.  On some systems, you can
                avoid this by setting $SIG{CHLD} to "IGNORE".  See also
                perlipc for more examples of forking and reaping
                moribund children.

Basically a Zombie process is a place to store the exit status whilst
waiting for the parent to do a "wait" on the child and collect it.

Normally it's not a problem with backtick, backtick usually waits on
the children and collects the exit status into $? for you.

Thus there is something odd ball about your kiddies...
>       result << `#{@caputackt} #{@channel} #{ackt}`

You're sort of asking the wrong question here. ie.
   result << `some string`
works simply and as expected, no raging zombies involved.

Your problem lies in what "#{@caputackt} #{@channel} #{ackt}" expands
to and you aren't telling us what that is!

Tell us that, and we'll tell you how to fix the problem.



John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch                Email : john.carter / tait.co.nz
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