Zombie Program ( follow up)

Peter Garrett peter.garrett at optusnet.com.au
Mon Apr 16 14:16:59 BST 2007


On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:59:11 +1000
Peter Garrett <peter.garrett at optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 20:36 +0800, Christopher Lees wrote:
> > If you see a zombie program listed in top, and it's using resources,
> > you
> > can kill it by typing the following:
> > 
> > k
> > The PID number of the zombie (the first column)
> > 9
> > 
> No, you can't actually :)
> 
> You *cannot kill a zombie process*
> 
> If its parent process is still alive, you can kill that - but by
> definition, even a SIGKILL ( kill -9 ) will not kill a zombie


From

http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-05-1999/swol-05-insidesolaris.html

"A primer on signals"

<quote>
This is why you can't kill zombie processes (any horror movie fan knows
you can't kill a zombie). A process must be executing in order to take
delivery of a signal. A zombie process is, by definition, a process that
has terminated. It exists only as a process table entry; all of its
execution state has been freed by the kernel. 
</quote>

Just to clarify...

Peter



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