Crond running to many processes <defunct>
 

Hello, I have a system running RedHat 9 with kernel 2.4.20.
I have a program that I need to be running all the time. So I have a script that checks to see if that program is running and if it is not, it starts it. I then have a cron job that runs this script every 2 minutes.
My problem is that whenever the program is started via the cron job, it creates a defunct process as well as a process for sendmail.
However if I call the script manually it starts just the program, which is what I want.
The script is called "checkgame"
Below is a sample output of ps -ef

root 27888 1 0 12:50 ? 00:00:00 CROND
root 27889 27888 0 12:50 ? 00:00:00 [checkgame <defunct>]
smmsp 27913 27888 0 12:50 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -FCronDaemon -i -odi -oem root
ja5 27916 1 3 12:50 ? 00:03:38 /home/ja5/game/linuxjampded

I only need the linuxjampded program to be running.
The checkgame script in turn calls a script called rungame which runs the /home/ja5/game/linuxjampded file. But it runs it with nohup.
nohup /home/ja5/game/linuxjampded &

Does anyone have any ideas that might help?
Thanks...

-Travis

I have a program that I need to be running all the time.
First make sure the app doesn't break due to configuration errors, network being down or other reasons. Then you got two choices: running the app out of init, or Google/Freshmeat for an app called "monit".