Emergency UNIX and Linux Support

I guess since your script was running in background as

Code:

nohup ksh rep_check &

and maybe after that the session was somehow killed, so your script was running under root.

ps -ef -o stat will give the current status of the process.

Z for zombie and S for sleep and so on..

What is rep_check? What's the output of

Code:

file rep_check

and

Code:

ls -la rep_check

Seems as if it's a setuid binary.

As I recall, (I'm not adminitrator of that application now)
I had a similar accident.
when calling the compilation with the command "nohup" the process we see as acting as a "root".
I found that when the compiler creates a new shared library, and therefore the author of the compile script authorized special user to run as root.
Normally, only moments compilation libraries could see it.
Note. libraries were created after compiled with chown special user.
By contrast, when start the command with nohup, it was immediately apparent as root always.

Its the initd process which inherites whose pid == 1. The root is just a user profile id which happens to be the default superuser of a system and NOT a process.

What does that mean? What do you mean by "orphaned"? Elevating a process to root privileges isn't the sort of thing your system should do.