Why? sh <defunct>

[Aaron Gaudio]

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 12:58 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> Looks like a bourne shell process.  A defunct process normally means a
> process exited that has a parent but the parent never waited for the
> child process.
> 
> You might get a little more info by using ps -Af.  

Also, it almost always means the parent it still around, because if the
parent exited, the child would be orphaned and re-parented to init,
which would immediately perform the wait(). In other words, they should
go away once the parent process is done.

BTW, IIRC, "defunct" children like this are also typically called
"zombie" processes. You can see a count of your zombie processes in the
top command (and possibly other similar utilities).