It'll be defunct because crond hasn't yet reaped the exited process. As to why it hasn't, I don't know; but I would speculate that crond is waiting for one for more of the STDIN/STDOUT/STDRR it passed to it's child to reach EOF; and maybe your child (crond's grandchild) is inheriting those file descriptors?

Dave.

In reply to Re: daemon/fork: defunct parent not going away nicely by dave_the_m
in thread daemon/fork: defunct parent not going away nicely by Cagao

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