Defunct?

[Julian Field]

This is a behaviour seen on a few operating system versions. It is entirely 
harmless and nothing to worry about. It doesn't affect your OS or 
MailScanner at all.

At 08:16 29/08/2002, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>I see a [mailscanner <defunct>] process that moves around to different PIDs.
>Mailscanner is still running the normal processes like:
>
>21759 ?  S  0:00 sendmail: accepting connections
>21764 ?  S  0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -q1m
>21773 ?  S  0:00 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/MailScanner/bin/mailscanner
>/usr/local/MailScanner/etc/mailscanner.conf
>
>and below this:
>
>21868 ?  Z  0:00 [mailscanner <defunct>]
>
>Anybody seen this? It seems like Mailscanner is working ok but I am a little
>worried about the defunct process...
>Does it mean that it breaks when scanning a message/bunch of messages? If
>so, why? I have recently uppgraded to the latest version (rpm on redhat 7.2)
>but I dont see any major changes that could cause this behaviour...
>
>Stay alert! :-)
>---------------------------------
>Carl Boberg
>System & Nätverksadministratör
>Enheten för informationsteknologi
>Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet
>carl.boberg at nrm.se
>Tel: 08-519 551 16
>Mob: 0701-82 40 55
>---------------------------------

-- 
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ