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Full Discussion: Help! Zombies
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Help! Zombies Post 302860177 by Don Cragun on Saturday 5th of October 2013 01:04:25 AM
Old 10-05-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by alister
In my post, the word "kill" does not refer to the system call nor the utility of the same name; it's merely colloquial English.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Cragun
Code:
kill 0 pid_of_zombie

will complete successfully telling you that the zombie hasn't been reaped yet.
That's not necessarily true. From POSIX :: functions :: kill:
Quote:
Existing implementations vary on the result of a kill() with pid indicating an inactive process (a terminated process that has not been waited for by its parent). Some indicate success on such a call (subject to permission checking), while others give an error of [ESRCH]. Since the definition of process lifetime in this volume of POSIX.1-2008 covers inactive processes, the [ESRCH] error as described is inappropriate in this case. In particular, this means that an application cannot have a parent process check for termination of a particular child with kill(). (Usually this is done with the null signal; this can be done reliably with waitpid().
Regards,
Alister
Historic implementations in 1988 (when the first System Interfaces volume of the POSIX standards was approved) behaved both ways. (Notably UNIX System V succeeded, and 4.3BSD returned an ESRCH error.) The standard required the System V behavior, and that was further reinforced when the 2008 edition of the standard clarified that the lifetime of a process does not end until it is reaped.

But, of course, some implementations of UNIX-like systems do not conform to the standards.
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

american-english-huge

american-english-huge(5)					   Users' Manual					  american-english-huge(5)

NAME

       american-english-huge - a list of English words

DESCRIPTION

       /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge is an ASCII file which contains an alphabetic list of words, one per line.

FILES

       There  may  be  any  number  of	word lists in /usr/share/dict/.  /etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen
       /usr/share/dict/<language> file.  /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and  is  the  name  by  which
       other  software should refer to the system word list.  See select-default-wordlist(8) for more information, and/or to change the currently-
       chosen word list.

       The directory /usr/share/dict can contain word lists for many languages, with name of the language in English, e.g., /usr/share/dict/french
       and  /usr/share/dict/danish  contain respectively lists of French and Danish words if they exist.  Such lists should be coded using the ISO
       8859-1 character set encoding.

SEE ALSO

       ispell(1), select-default-wordlist(8), and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

HISTORY

       The words lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources.

       The system word list used to be /usr/dict/words.  For compatibility, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words does  not
       exist.

AUTHOR

       Word  lists  are  collected and maintained by various authors.  The Debian English word lists are built from the SCOWL (Spell- Checker Ori-
       ented Word Lists) package, whose upstream editor is Kevin Atkinson <kevina@users.sourceforge.net>.

Debian								   16 June 2003 					  american-english-huge(5)
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