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Full Discussion: Zombie process question
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Zombie process question Post 302515210 by methyl on Tuesday 19th of April 2011 11:45:49 AM
Old 04-19-2011
Quote:
A process that is hung up on I/O is not a zombie
True. But a Zombie process which is also hung on I/O may never go away without a reboot. I have seen this with failed hardware monitoring software.

Anybody got an example to post?

It is important that we do not confuse Orphan processes (where the parent has failed) with a Zombie processes.

Finding Zombie processes depends on what version of "ps" your have.
For example:
Code:
Berkeley
ps -eo state,pid,ppid|grep \^Z
Unix SV
ps -ef|grep "defunct"


This piece of code is crude and dangerous (and it doesn't work):
Quote:
3. Do this command to find the parent ID that relates to the zombie and then kill it:
# ps aux -eo ppid| grep <Zombie Process ID>
# kill -9 <PPID>
Use the "ps -p" switch to look up the parent process ID.
Code:
ps -p<PID> -oppid

Then look carefully at the process before considering killing the process using the correct kill signal for that process (which is unlikely to be "-9"). Also do not kill init (PID 1).


One way to cause Zombie processes and other horrors is indiscriminate use of "kill -9".

Last edited by methyl; 04-19-2011 at 01:53 PM..
 

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KILL(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   KILL(1)

NAME
kill, broke - print commands to kill processes SYNOPSIS
kill name broke DESCRIPTION
Kill prints commands that will cause all processes called name and owned by the current user to be terminated. Use the send command of 81/2(1), or pipe the output of kill into rc(1) to execute the commands. Kill suggests sending a kill note to the process; the same message delivered to the process's ctl file (see proc(3)) is a surer, if heavy handed, kill, but is necessary if the offending process is ignoring notes. Broke prints commands that will cause all processes in the Broken state and owned by the current user to go away. When a process dies because of an error caught by the system, it may linger in the Broken state to allow examination with a debugger. Executing the commands printed by broke lets the system reclaim the resources used by the broken processes. SOURCE
/rc/bin/kill /rc/bin/broke SEE ALSO
ps(1), stop(1), proc(3) KILL(1)
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