Re: killed process still on-screen
On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 13:52:25 -0500, dman <dsh8290@rit.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 08:15:49AM +0800, csj wrote:
> | On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 19:42:40 -0600
> | Nori Heikkinen <nori@sccs.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> |
> | > on Thu, 17 Jan 2002 11:33:25PM +0200, Ian Balchin insinuated:
> | > > I locked up mutt & jove while editing a message. I killed them from
> | > > top but cannot get use of tty1 back which still shows the process.
> | > >
> | > > I do not want to reboot. Any magical suggestions which rtfm to
> | > > examine?
> | >
> | > ps aux | grep tty1
> | > kill -9 [pid of tty1]
> |
> | Is there anything more drastic than -9 (short of rebooting)?
>
> nope. processes aren't allowed to handle signal 9 so they can't block
> it like they can with 15 or 11.
>
> | How do I terminate the living dead?
> |
> | alpha:~# ps -A | grep defunct
> | 31080 ? 00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
> | 31081 ? 00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
> | alpha:~# kill -9 31080
> | alpha:~# ps -A | grep defunct
> | 31080 ? 00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
> | 31081 ? 00:00:00 gpg <defunct>
> |
> | And here's top's top:
> |
> | 08:11:45 up 5 days, 17:10, 6 users, load average: 0.07, 0.03, 0.00
> | 94 processes: 91 sleeping, 1 running, 2 zombie, 0 stopped
>
> Those processes are blocked on IO or something. Thus it is the
> _kernel_ itself that is stuck, which is why SIGKILL has no effect.
> When a process is executing in its own space, the kernel can kill it
> and clean up the pieces. When the process is executing inside the
> kernel (in a system call) then the kernel can't blow it away because
> it would then need to somehow put itself back together.
I believe those are zombies of one or more forked processes. They're
kept around so the parent can do a waitpid() on them. Other than
a PID, they shouldn't be taking up any memory or other resources.
Sylpheed is notorious for creating gpg zombies.... They'll dissappear
when the parent exits.
--
Eric G. Miller <egm2@jps.net>
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