UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Here is the scenario:

Using a client server, I log into various other servers on our network opening multiple terminals to monitor processes. Once I ssh into these servers as myself, I ssh in as another user. Sometimes I set up while -1 loops to monitor various processes. At the end of the day, I use the 'kill -KILL -1' command to kill my logins and processes associated with my logins. I've noticed the user I 'su' to has defunct processes and these processes seem to be increasing each time I logout at the end of the day. I've verified this by executing a:

ps -ef | grep user | grep defunct | wc -l

Is there a command that I can safely use that will shutdown all my processes that I opened and avoid these defunct processes? Hopefully, I've provided enough information so you all can help to answer my question.

Thanks in advance.

Unless you disowned them from your shell, I imagine they'd get killed when you logged out. If you are disowning them, maybye you shouldn't, afterall, that's one thing the shell's there for. Keeping them in the shell should be better for not leaving defunct processes; having the shell quit before they do leaves them hanging when they quit, there's nothing to 'catch' them.

Thanks for the reply.

My previous understanding was that I could execute the subject command and the command would close the shell and kill all processes associated with the shell, but from my readings on this forum and reading a liitle more in some other books, I've come to find that although one may kill the shell, the processes that were opened as another user within the shell will continue to run as zombies or defunct processes.

My desire was to learn commands or execute a script that would kill all PPIDs and PIDs at the same time. I think it is just a waste of time to sit and exit out of every terminal at the end of my workday and believe me I open many when I'm at work, so if anyone knows safe commands or a script that I could use, I'd certainly appreciate it. That would help me to avoid these defunct processes and use UNIX the way it was intended (make my job easier).

Thanks....

They're not running, they're dead. They're just stuck in the process table because their parent processes, the things that need to deal with them, have been killed too. That's why some signals are catchable, and why -KILL should be used only as a last resort; things like shells will catch SIGTERM and gracefully deal with terminating their child processes before exiting, while SIGKILL kills them and leaves their zombie children hanging. Now there's a mental image.

There are two things you can do, from what I know.The latter is probably a more elegant way to do it, and the procedure I see linux do when shutting down... You don't want to use -KILL unless you absolutely need it, 'cause it can make a big mess.

Code:

#!/bin/sh

echo "Sending processes SIGTERM"
kill -TERM -1
sleep 5
echo "Sending remaining processes SIGKILL"
kill -KILL -1