Dears, Now I am facing an annoying problem. I have an application in Zope which calls a External Method, which calls a bash script via: var_pid = os.spawnlp(os.P_NOWAIT, 'script.sh', 'script.sh', arg1,arg2) The idea is to start some programs in background (which will take hours running) and I need to pass arguments and track its PID for eventually checking its status. So os.spawnlp seemed the perfect solution. However, when my bash script finished, my processes gets <defunct> childed to the Zope process. And only restarting Zope to get rid of such defunct process, an unthinkable solution. I am running: Plone 2.1.2, Zope (Zope 2.8.5-final, python 2.3.5, sunos5), Python 2.3.5 (#1, Feb 14 2006, 10:51:41) [C], -- Alan Wilter S. da Silva, D.Sc. - Research Associate Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. 80 Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1GA, UK.