On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 14:45 -0500, Gilberto I. Monroy Lopez wrote:
Hi
Does anybody knows how to kill a zombie process? I know that the only way to kill the zombie process is when you reboot the computer, but if I couldnt do that? what other options does I have?, somebody told me that there is another way and it is sending a signal to the process zombie because it is in a state of wait4(), but I dont know it is true but if it were, how could i do that? because the parent is the init process pid 1..
A zombie is already dead, so it can't be killed, and it is in no state The parent process is grimly responsible for reaping its dead children (aren't UNIX metaphors fun? :) and if it doesn't, you're stuck with them, but it's nothing really to worry about unless there are so many of them that they fill up the process table (highly unlikely) The init process will sooner or later get rid of them if it is the parent