Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:46:20 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Too many defunct processes; kill -9 not working Message-ID: <87bpbk9xwj.fsf@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinguZnvQTeA-SCiFqjGSIzejKaaf7_MPdqryN0p@mail.gmail.com> (Eitan Adler's message of "Wed, 9 Jun 2010 14:08:58 %2B0300") References: <AANLkTinguZnvQTeA-SCiFqjGSIzejKaaf7_MPdqryN0p@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 14:08:58 +0300, Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com> wrote: > Lately I've been getting a considerable number of defunct processes. I > do not know of any major event that changed my computer (ie it is not > related to an ports update or a freeBSD upgrade). > > This is often caused by me killing the process using kill -15 or kill > -3 or kill -9. > > What can I do to determine why processes are not getting killed by kill -9? > > % ps -o ppid -o comm|grep defunct|cut -d ' ' -f 1 |xargs kill -9 > typically gets rid of them (by killing their parent) That's the only way to kill zombies... You can't signal the zombie/defunct process itself, because it's gone already. But you can kill the process who spawned it.
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