zentara wrote:
On Sat, 3 Aug 2002 13:05:14 +0200 Clayton Cornell
wrote: So... how do you kill a process that is ignoring your attempts at a kill -9 ??
Typing kill-9 1626 seems to work - ie no errors back at the command line, but if I check with ps -e they are still there.
Just to try it, I su'ed to root and tried killing the process... same results. No erros reported, just the immortal process the refuses to be killed.
Any ideas or suggestions?
Those are zombie processes, those are children of some parent process which you already killed off. They don't respond because they are already dead, so you don't need to worry about them, they use no memory. Parents are supposed to wait for children to die before they exit, if they don't, the children become zombies, like "ghost processes". They can only be removed by a reboot.
This can be not only zombie :-( Such type of process can appear in case of i/o problems. For instance, I had this problem when I had tape drive failed- Linux think that /dev/st0 is busy with process, but /dev/st0 simply does not responded. I can reset drive, but only way to return it to Linux is reboot. The same problem is with smbfs :-(((