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Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 15:13:39 +0200
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To: Joshua Gimer <jgimer@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: Too many defunct processes; kill -9 not working
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On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Joshua Gimer <jgimer@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 5:08 AM, Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com> wrote:
>> What can I do to determine why processes are not getting killed by kill -9?
>
> Try attaching to it using truss to see if it will shed some light on the
> reason why the process will not die.

The only reason for zombies is that the parent process doesn't
invoke the wait(2) system call to reclaim their return status.
I'd truss(1) the parent: maybe it is buggy or even stopped (SIGSTOP?).

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