Defunct Processes

[iis!venkat at sun.com]

I am sure this question was asked several times but I did not keep track
of it. I have a daemon process which forks out to do various tasks and 
also notices the termination of its children by doing a
   signal(SIGCHLD, function)
However when I do a ps, I find several defunct processes, apparently
children of my daemon process. How do I prevent such processes being in the
system? What exactly is a defunct process. I am running my processes on a
Sun 4. Thanks.

Venkat Rao
International Imaging Systems
sun!iis!venkat at uunet.uu.net