From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jan 6 13: 2:11 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de (dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de [139.174.243.252]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 554AF1574F for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2000 13:02:05 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de) Received: (from olli@localhost) by dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id WAA29331; Thu, 6 Jan 2000 22:02:02 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from olli) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 22:02:02 +0100 (CET) Message-Id: <200001062102.WAA29331@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> From: Oliver Fromme To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Killing Zombies. X-Newsgroups: list.freebsd-questions In-Reply-To: <852318$2vsr$1@atlantis.rz.tu-clausthal.de> User-Agent: tin/1.4.1-19991201 ("Polish") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/3.4-19991219-STABLE (i386)) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Chris.Smith@raytheon.co.uk wrote in list.freebsd-questions: > Can't you just remove the process table entry from somewhere - It makes ps > outputs big! If that's your only concern, then you shouldn't do anything about it. Use grep to filter them from your ps output. To get rid of the "zombie processes", find their parent processes (with ps) and kill them. (Technical details: The init process [PID 1] collects all orphaned processes and cares for them. So if a parent process is killed, its children are picked up by the init process. If there are any zombies, init will grab their exit status, and the zombies can finally rest in peace.) The real solution is -- of course -- to fix the broken programs. "Zombie processes" that are hanging around are always a sign of bad programming. Regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, Leibnizstr. 18/61, 38678 Clausthal, Germany (Info: finger userinfo:olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de) "In jedem Stück Kohle wartet ein Diamant auf seine Geburt" (Terry Pratchett) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message