Re: can't kill crashed processes

[Rick Stevens <rstevens vitalstream com>]

Benjamin Hornberger wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have the problem that I can't kill certain frozen processes on RHEL AS 
> 3. Somehow, up2date crashes each time when I try to run it from a Win XP 
> machine tunneled through SSH (with Exceed running), and now I have three 
> of these processes around.
>
> [root host root]# ps -ef | grep up2date
> root      3178     1  0 09:33 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      3366     1  0 09:44 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      6851     1  5 13:43 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      6918  6871  0 13:45 pts/3    00:00:00 grep up2date
> [root host root]# kill -9 3178
> [root host root]# ps -ef | grep up2date
> root      3178     1  0 09:33 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      3366     1  0 09:44 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      6851     1  4 13:43 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      6920  6871  0 13:45 pts/3    00:00:00 grep up2date
> [root host root]# kill -9 3366
> [root host root]# ps -ef | grep up2date
> root      3178     1  0 09:33 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      3366     1  0 09:44 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      6851     1  4 13:43 ?        00:00:05 /usr/bin/python -u 
> /usr/sbin/up2date
> root      6922  6871  0 13:45 pts/3    00:00:00 grep up2date
> [root host root]#

Do a "ps -ax" and see if the processes are shown with "<defunct>".  If
so, they're zombies and you won't be able to get rid of them unless you
kill their parent process.  In your case, the parent process is "init"
(the master process) and the only way to kill init safely is to reboot.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens vitalstream com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-         The world is coming to an end ... SAVE YOUR FILES!!!       -
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