How to find and clear zombie processes w/o rebooting?

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Thu Jun 26 01:52:36 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 18:33 -0700, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> Using F8, I have found that Nautilus sometimes hangs and
> runs at 100% CPU.  Force killing Nautilus's drive windows
> was the only way to recover.  I am not sure that force killing
> this drive window is related to the zombie that I founding using
> top.
> 
> I also discovered that my swap was increased to 2GB of 4GB
> and has stayed there ever since.
> 
> So before I accuse Nautilus as being the zombie process, how
> do I locate it using ps or some other tool to find out what is
> going on and to what process the zombie was?
> 
> In the same breadth, is there a way to clear zombie processes
> without being forced to reboot the system which would certainly
> remove the zombie process and clear the swap space?
----
you have to kill the parent - you can locate the parent process by
running 'ps auxwwf'

Craig




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