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Full Discussion: <DEFUNCT> Processes
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers <DEFUNCT> Processes Post 1259 by 98_1LE on Tuesday 20th of February 2001 01:12:36 PM
Old 02-20-2001
Defunct processes (also called zombie processes) are processes which were not cleaned up by their parent, and the parent process has died. They cannot be killed without a reboot. I don't worry too much about them.

Edit - I missed the title first time. This was my original; response.
Can you paste what you are seeing? If it is;
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD

UID=User ID the process is running as (typically who started the process)
PID=Process ID of this process (every process has a unique ID)
PPID=Parent process which spawned this process
C=??? I think it has something to do with priority
STIME=When the proess was spawned
TTY=Terminal process is attached to
TIME=Cumulative processor time used by this process
CMD=Actual command that is running

[Edited by 98_1LE on 02-20-2001 at 01:15 PM]
 

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PS(1)							      General Commands Manual							     PS(1)

NAME
ps - process status SYNOPSIS
ps [ aklx ] [ namelist ] DESCRIPTION
Ps prints certain indicia about active processes. The a option asks for information about all processes with terminals (ordinarily only one's own processes are displayed); x asks even about processes with no terminal; l asks for a long listing. The short listing contains the process ID, tty letter, the cumulative execution time of the process and an approximation to the command line. The long listing is columnar and contains F Flags associated with the process. 01: in core; 02: system process; 04: locked in core (e.g. for physical I/O); 10: being swapped; 20: being traced by another process. S The state of the process. 0: nonexistent; S: sleeping; W: waiting; R: running; I: intermediate; Z: terminated; T: stopped. UID The user ID of the process owner. PID The process ID of the process; as in certain cults it is possible to kill a process if you know its true name. PPID The process ID of the parent process. CPU Processor utilization for scheduling. PRI The priority of the process; high numbers mean low priority. NICE Used in priority computation. ADDR The core address of the process if resident, otherwise the disk address. SZ The size in blocks of the core image of the process. WCHAN The event for which the process is waiting or sleeping; if blank, the process is running. TTY The controlling tty for the process. TIME The cumulative execution time for the process. The command and its arguments. A process that has exited and has a parent, but has not yet been waited for by the parent is marked <defunct>. Ps makes an educated guess as to the file name and arguments given when the process was created by examining core memory or the swap area. The method is inherently somewhat unreliable and in any event a process is entitled to destroy this information, so the names cannot be counted on too much. If the k option is specified, the file /usr/sys/core is used in place of /dev/mem. This is used for postmortem system debugging. If a second argument is given, it is taken to be the file containing the system's namelist. FILES
/unix system namelist /dev/mem core memory /usr/sys/core alternate core file /dev searched to find swap device and tty names SEE ALSO
kill(1) BUGS
Things can change while ps is running; the picture it gives is only a close approximation to reality. Some data printed for defunct processes is irrelevant PDP11 PS(1)
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