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#1 2004-12-24 20:47:19

ylikone
Member
From: Southern Ontario
Registered: 2004-12-17
Posts: 45
Website

Lots of defunct processes

Doing a "ps auwx | grep defunct" gets me a number of processes that seem to be zombied:

user   2381  0.8  0.0      0     0 ?        Zs   02:24   0:41 [gqview] <defunct>
user   2397  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Zs   02:28   0:00 [firefox] <defunct>
user   2476  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Zs   02:53   0:00 [firefox] <defunct>
user   2627  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Zs   03:26   0:00 [soffice.bin] <defunct>
user   2765  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Zs   03:29   0:00 [firefox] <defunct>

Now, why would these programs be doing this?  As far as I know, I started each of those programs and then shut them down and these zombies get left behind.  I try to kill them off with "kill -9" and they won't die.  Anybody else have this problem or know what's happening?

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#2 2004-12-24 21:31:23

i3839
Member
Registered: 2004-02-04
Posts: 1,185

Re: Lots of defunct processes

A zombie isn't much more than the return value of an exited process. They're dead and gone already, nothing to kill. They're left behind because the program starting them (most likely your window manager) didn't call wait(), nor ignored the exit signal. It's harmless, but it's a mess left behind by a sloppy program.

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#3 2004-12-24 23:12:55

ylikone
Member
From: Southern Ontario
Registered: 2004-12-17
Posts: 45
Website

Re: Lots of defunct processes

I see.  I use icewm and didn't have this problem until I upgraded icewm... so maybe there is a bug there somewhere.

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