popen2/close leaves defunct process

[Phil Cummins]

Hello,

  I'm using octave 2.0.16 on a Redhat Linux 6.2
system. I use popen2 to open a pipe to a subprocess,
much as is described in the help page for open2:

  [in, out, pid] = popen2 ("sort", "-nr");
  fputs (in, "theseŠÜn");
  fputs (in, "areŠÜn");
  fputs (in, "someŠÜn");
  fputs (in, "stringsŠÜn");
  fclose (in);
  while (isstr (s = fgets (out)))
    fputs (stdout, s);
  endwhile
  fclose (out);

(I verified that I do get the following behavior for the
above example)

However, I notice that this leaves a defunct process
in my process table:

% ps x | grep sort
13608 pts/7    Z      0:00 [sort <defunct>]

which remains there until I quit octave. I plan to use 
popen2 in this way many times during an octave session.
Is there any way to remove this process from the table 
when I'm finished with it? Thanks.









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