[PLUG] How to kill firefox.bin

Russell Johnson russj at dimstar.net
Mon Oct 8 01:11:22 UTC 2007


On Oct 7, 2007, at 5:12 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:

>
> I couldn't agree more, and I have no explanation for why kill didn't
> work, other than the fact that it was a zombie.

That's exactly why you can't 'kill' it. A zombie is already dead.  
It's consuming almost zero resources. A zombie has transfered from  
the userspace to the kernel space and is now a child of init. It's  
waiting to be reaped by it's parent process (ppid in ps -l) If the  
ppid isn't around anymore, then it will never go away until you reboot.

> It seems to me that if
> the owner of the process says to kill the process, then there ought to
> be a command with sufficient force to kill it.

You can't kill what's already dead.

> (And I did sudo the
> commands as well, just in case forefox.bin thought I wasn't the  
> owner.)
> Even if it's a zombie, the owner of the process ought to be able to
> nuke it. Maybe I need a "really really really kill it and I mean it"
> command.

Read this page: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/tips/zombies.html

Russ



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