Avoiding defunct processes

[Richard]

Hello,

I create child processes with subprocess.Popen().
Then I either wait for them to finish or kill them.
Either way these processes end up as defunct until the parent process
completes:
$ ps e
6851 pts/5    Z+     1:29 [python] <defunct>

This confuses another library as to whether the processes are
complete.
For now I detect which processes are defunct by parsing the output of
"ps".
What would you recommend? I am hoping there is a cleaner way.

Richard