AIX

Zombies have a living parent who can't be bothered to clean up. If that parent dies, it's surviving child processes, including zombies, will get a new ppid of 1 and now the parent will be init. init always reaps all child zombies.

So...want a zombie to go away? Look it up in ps and note the ppid. The is the pid of the misbehaving parent. Kill the parent. In a second or two the zombies should be gone.

At least this is the way unix is supposed to work. Is AIX really different than this?

In (more than) one word: you don't want to know. ;-)) *)

Some (few) zombies can be cleaned up this way, most can't. I don't know why, but common knowledge and my experience is "zombies can only be cleaned by a reboot".

bakunin

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*) Years ago, when AIX 3.2.5 was current, there was a saying that this was the best MVS IBM had ever built. Go figure....

Thanks all for your thoughts ...
Can any one share me a hint as to why these processes are starting after 15-20 hrs of the reboot . This is been happening from last few days .. Is there any script or anything i should check which could generate this at this time ?