[PLUG] How to kill firefox.bin

Brian Beattie beattie at beattie-home.net
Tue Oct 9 03:20:28 UTC 2007


On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 06:31 -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Oct 2007, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 
> > Even if it's a zombie, the owner of the process ought to be able to
> > nuke it.
> 
>    You've identified the problem here. The process is a zombie because it no
> longer has a live owner. It's an orphan process.
> 
>    Now, if there was a tool that could specifically seek out zombies and kill
> them off, that would be a different story.

Actually a zombie is a process that has exited but whose exit status has
not been retrieved by it's parent via a wait system call.  Every process
has a parent, if a processes parent exits, it is inherited by process 1.
Process 1 is init which is always waiting for processes those scavenging
zombies.  There is no way I know of to kill a zombie process as a zombie
is already dead.

> 
> Rich
> 
-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting a bad thing?

Brian Beattie   LFS12947 | "Honor isn't about making the right choices.
beattie at beattie-home.net | It's about dealing with the consequences."
www.beattie-home.net     | -- Midori Koto




More information about the PLUG mailing list