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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers what is zombie , how to kill it , Post 302475936 by jim mcnamara on Tuesday 30th of November 2010 10:31:45 AM
Old 11-30-2010
methyl is right on about kill -9.

zombies use no resources except one - they use a process entry slot. Unless you have really large numbers of zombies that is usually not a problem.

zombies are caused by the parent process doing something stupid, namely not wait - ing on a child process. This can often be caused by blocking SIGCHLD with SIG_IGN. In that case the only way for the zombie to go away is when the parent exits, and init adopts the zombies. One of init primary jobs is to wait for parentless processes, adopt the zombie process and then wait for the zombie so it can leave and go to heaven.

I personally think people's aversion to zombies has more to do with the movies and popular culture and very little to do with what they do to unix boxes. It's all in the name.
 

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KILLALL(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						KILLALL(1)

NAME
killall -- kill processes by name SYNOPSIS
killall [-delmsvz] [-help] [-I] [-j jail] [-u user] [-t tty] [-c procname] [-SIGNAL] [procname ...] DESCRIPTION
The killall utility kills processes selected by name, as opposed to the selection by PID as done by kill(1). By default, it will send a TERM signal to all processes with a real UID identical to the caller of killall that match the name procname. The super-user is allowed to kill any process. The options are as follows: -d | -v Be more verbose about what will be done. For a single -d option, a list of the processes that will be sent the signal will be printed, or a message indicating that no matching processes have been found. -e Use the effective user ID instead of the (default) real user ID for matching processes specified with the -u option. -help Give a help on the command usage and exit. -I Request confirmation before attempting to signal each process. -l List the names of the available signals and exit, like in kill(1). -m Match the argument procname as a (case sensitive) regular expression against the names of processes found. CAUTION! This is dangerous, a single dot will match any process running under the real UID of the caller. -s Show only what would be done, but do not send any signal. -SIGNAL Send a different signal instead of the default TERM. The signal may be specified either as a name (with or without a leading ``SIG''), or numerically. -j jail Kill processes in the specified jail. -u user Limit potentially matching processes to those belonging to the specified user. -t tty Limit potentially matching processes to those running on the specified tty. -c procname Limit potentially matching processes to those matching the specified procname. -q Suppress error message if no processes are matched. -z Do not skip zombies. This should not have any effect except to print a few error messages if there are zombie processes that match the specified pattern. ALL PROCESSES
Sending a signal to all processes with the given UID is already supported by kill(1). So use kill(1) for this job (e.g. ``kill -TERM -1'' or as root ``echo kill -TERM -1 | su -m <user>''). IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
This FreeBSD implementation of killall has completely different semantics as compared to the traditional UNIX System V behavior of killall. The latter will kill all processes that the current user is able to kill, and is intended to be used by the system shutdown process only. EXIT STATUS
The killall utility exits 0 if some processes have been found and signalled successfully. Otherwise, a status of 1 will be returned. DIAGNOSTICS
Diagnostic messages will only be printed if requested by -d options. SEE ALSO
kill(1), pkill(1), sysctl(3), jail(8) HISTORY
The killall command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. It has been modeled after the killall command as available on other platforms. AUTHORS
The killall program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider, this manual page has been written by Jorg Wunsch. The current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using sysctl(3). BSD
June 30, 2013 BSD
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