zombie

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 12:05 -0400, ajtiM wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I uninstalled Festival and now i have one zombie:
> 
>  8687 ?        00:00:00 speech-dispatch
>  8689 ?        00:00:00 sd_flite
>  8694 ?        00:00:00 sd_festival <defunct>
> 
> I killed speech-dispatch but when i start computer again process are still 
> here.

Try "ps wwwauxf | less" and search using "/" for "speech".  I'm guessing
you'll see that the 'sd_festival' was a child process of
'speech-dispatch'.  If it's hanging out for long as a zombie like that,
it probably means that the 'speech-dispatch' program has not performed a
"wait()" system call for it (see: 'man wait' if you have the
manpages-dev package installed, or find it in "info libc" if you have
the glibc-doc).  That's a minor bug in the program.  A zombie does not
take up much resources, so don't fret it too much.

You might check with the package maintainer and see if a bug has been
filed or an easy patch can be created to fix it.  The maintainer's name
is visible in the "dpkg --status PACKAGENAME" output.