Brad Alexander wrote: > Over the past few days, I've noticed on my sid workstation, that the number > of zombie knotify processes has been increasing. Sunday, I had about six. > Now I am up to 56. Has anyone else seen this behavior from knotify? I don't use KDE nor knotify so have no comments specifically there. However I wanted to note that zombies are left behind when the *parent* of the process misbehaves. If the parent does not wait(2) for their dead children then the child process slot must remain around as a zombie process to hold the exit status information until it is transfered to the parent using wait(2). That is why you can't kill zombies. They are already dead. Look for the parent process to identify the problem. ps -efH | less The 'H' will sort processes hierarchically. Search for the zombie parent process. That will identify the problem process. I don't know if this will help or hinder but when a process is killed init inherits all of the children and wait(2)s for them. Therefore killing the bad parent will release all of the zombie children. Whether that will leave things in a good state or not in your environment I don't know but killing the parent will allow the zombies to finally die. Bob
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