Revisiting issue #10 which was closed due to age ( and the prior https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9056 ) In addition to what's detailed in the above bugs, here are steps to reproduce: 1) Create a ~/.xsession file and run something in it. In my case I ran some backgrounded pipewire daemons but I'm sure `sleep 3600&` would work too. 2) Examine the process tree under xfce4-session to find zombies - in my case the shell used to run .xsession was itself left as a zombie ``` nn:[eam]:~$ ps -ef|grep 848 eam 848 831 0 Aug27 ? 00:00:00 xfce4-session eam 858 848 0 Aug27 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/pipewire eam 859 848 0 Aug27 ? 00:00:00 [sh] <defunct> eam 860 848 0 Aug27 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/wireplumber eam 945 848 0 Aug27 ? 00:00:11 xfwm4 ... ``` This would happen because xfce4-session is spawning child processes and not wait()ing on them: * it forked a /bin/sh to run .xesssion * That shell exited * xfce4-session did not call wait() I grabbed the code and took a quick look, but I did not see where xfce4-session spawns the shell to execute .xsession. If someone could point me at where that happens I might be able to offer specific advice as to how to fix - I'm not familiar with this codebase. Maybe it's in another component? Interestingly, I did see that xfce4-session DOES successfully wait() on some of its child processes. Here, I `strace`'d xfce4-session and then killed xfce4-screensaver. We can see that xfce4-session did correctly reap the dead screensaver process ``` nn:[eam]:~$ sudo strace -f -p 848 strace: Process 848 attached with 4 threads [pid 894] futex(0x5620e1487620, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 1, NULL <unfinished ...> [pid 848] restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted read ...> <unfinished ...> [pid 896] restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted futex ...> <unfinished ...> [pid 895] restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted futex ...> <unfinished ...> [pid 848] <... restart_syscall resumed>) = 1 [pid 896] <... restart_syscall resumed>) = 1 [pid 848] waitid(P_PIDFD, 26, <unfinished ...> [pid 896] write(7, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8 <unfinished ...> [pid 848] <... waitid resumed>0x7ffcc02649e0, WNOHANG|WEXITED, NULL) = -1 ECHILD (No child processes) ``` I did not see a call to waitid() in xfce4-session's codebase so maybe this is done in a library somewhere?