Re: Zombies

[Jiri Baum <jiri@baum.com.au>]

Hello,

Chris Brown:
> kill pid# did not work. Somewhere along the way the jobs attained the
> "zombie" status, and kill wouldn't touch them. I finally rebooted.
> 
> Can someone explain what a zombie is and how to kill it?

The idea is that when a process dies, gets killed or just exits, its parent
must be notified; if this notification can't happen at once, the process is
labelled `zombie'. When notification goes through, the zombie disappears.

So basically it's being kept around for bookkeeping reasons.

To get rid of a zombie, you can also kill the parent.


HTH

Jiri
-- 
<jiri@baum.com.au>
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