Re: how to kill a process that is "defunct"?

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:03:19 -0600, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:

> Sjoerd Hardeman wrote:
>> Hugo Vanwoerkom schreef:
>>> Roman Khomasuridze wrote:
>>>>     xkill is your friend.
>>>>
>>>>  or kill -9
>>>
>>> But OP said he tried that and it did not help.
>>>
>>>
>> Try to kill the parent process. If it doesn't have a parent process,
>> then it is unkillable. It uses no recourses, so usually it is not a
>> problem.
>> 
> But OP said that it had the CPU pegged, so indeed a reboot is the only
> way to solve this.

"You can't kill the dead" (it's not my phrase, read bellow...) :-)

Linux Tips / Zombies
http://www.linuxsa.org.au/tips/zombies.html

Summarizing:

"(...) You have three choices: Fix the parent process (make it wait); 
kill the parent; or live with it.  Remember that living with it is not so 
hard because zombies take up little more than one extra line in the 
output of ps."

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón