Re: is killing zombies possible w/o a reboot?

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Wed Nov 03 2004 - 18:05:23 EST


DervishD wrote:
Hi all :)

* Måns Rullgård <mru@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> dixit:

I'd tried to kill the zombie earlier but couldn't.
Isn't there some way to clean up a &^$#^#@)_ zombie?

Kill the parent, is the only (portable) way.

Perhaps not as portable, but another possible, though slightly
complicated, way is to ptrace the parent and force it to wait().


Or write a little program that just 'wait()'s for the specified
PID's. That is perfectly portable IMHO. But I must admit that the
preferred way should be killing the parent. 'init' will reap the
children after that.

You can't wait() for the process, you have to use waitfor(), and the last time I tried that it didn't work, although I don't remember the symptom beyond that.

--
-bill davidsen (davidsen@xxxxxxx)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
last possible moment - but no longer" -me
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/