Running under mod_perl/Apache I have the following snippet

open(RPC,"/bin/rpcinfo -p foo|") or die ...
while(<RPC>) {
   # do something with the output
}
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Because of laziness I didn't bother to close (RPC); but I noticed that zombies for sh and rpcinfo were appearing. They went away when I added the close.
I guess that it is expected given that the purpose of mod_perl is to keep the module loaded but I was surprised not to have come across this anywhere in the documentation.
Can someone confirm that this is expected behaviour - if not perhaps it shows that something is wrong with my mod_perl/Apache configuration.