night of the living dead (processes)?

[Ed Grimm <ed@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Is there any way to handle the children produced in the <() construct
(and similar ones, as well) in zsh, instead of tossing them to init?
I've been running scripts which utilize this construct heavily, and I've
been monitoring them with top, and I've noticed they toss an awful lot
of zombies to init, based on the fact that init starts taking lots of
time (60%+ CPU at bad times), and if I renice init, top starts catching
zombies, a couple times more than twenty.

init is not good at handling zombies, since it needs to re-read
/etc/inittab each time (and it should, too), as well as checking all of
the tasks mentioned there to make sure they're still running.  I'm
running ZSH_VERSION 3.1.1.  I contemplated upgrading to 3.0.5, but it's
slower for all of my longest running tasks (**/glob stuff, and such) as
well as all other so I did not make install.  Bash also has this
problem.

Ed