Hi:

We use the following script in our buildifs for starting up our network related resources:

ifconfig en0 10.13.129.77 netmask 255.255.252.0
route add 0.0.0.0 10.13.128.2
inetd /etc/inetd.conf &

If I instrument the above script with 'pidin' calls before and after the inetd calls, I  notice that a zombie process 
seems to get created:

pidin -F "%a %60N %e"
  .
  .
  .
 155673 bin/sh                                                          1
 159771 proc/boot/io-net                                           1
 172058 proc/boot/esh                                              155673
 188444 (Zombie)                                                     172058
 188445 proc/boot/pidin                                            172058
 188446 proc/boot/inetd                                           188444

The third column is the parent PID. As you can see the Zombie is owned by esh which runs the network init script. Esh in
 turn is spawned by the sh command which is launched by yet another higher level script in the buildifs.

After a short time, the zombie get taken over by the kernel and cleaned up some time later. However, in the meantime the
 existance of a zombie process causes other problems with our software.

Any idea what this zombie process is and why it gets created? I tried removing the ampersand when launching and it 
resolves the zombie creation problem however the inetd process is now stuck in a SIGSUSPEND state.