02-16-2009
Hello,
A ZOMBIE program is NOT something you want in your system.
It is a process that crashed and which is robbing memory space and/or cpu cycles.
They are detached from any terminals or processes that lauched it in the first place and are hard to kill. sometime only a reboot can get rid of it.
However, if you want to launch a program in the background there is 2 options to do so.
A) /usr/bin/your program &
B) nohup /usr/bin/your program
The differences lies in what your program do when you log out.
A) The program terminates upon login out
B) The program keep on running and only a kill or fuser command will stop it.
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kill(1) General Commands Manual kill(1)
Name
kill - send a signal to a process
Syntax
kill [-sig] processid...
kill -l
Description
The command sends the TERM (terminate, 15) signal to the specified processes. If a signal name or number preceded by `-' is given as first
argument, that signal is sent instead of terminate. For further information, see
The terminate signal kills processes that do not catch the signal; `kill -9 ...' is a sure kill, as the KILL (9) signal cannot be caught.
By convention, if process number 0 is specified, all members in the process group (that is, processes resulting from the current login) are
signaled. This works only if you use and not if you use To kill a process it must either belong to you or you must be superuser.
The process number of an asynchronous process started with `&' is reported by the shell. Process numbers can also be found by using It
allows job specifiers ``%...'' so process ID's are not as often used as arguments. See for details.
Options
-l Lists signal names. The signal names are listed by `kill -l', and are as given in /usr/include/signal.h, stripped of the common SIG
prefix.
See Also
csh(1), ps(1), kill(2), sigvec(2)
kill(1)