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How to kill a Zombie?
Authored by: babbage on Dec 06, '02 05:42:40PM

I forget the exact definition at the moment, but basically a zombie process is one that is stuck in a situation where it is waiting for some kind of system event or input. So for example if you have a login shell and kill the window, maybe your shell process could end up being a zombie if it's waiting for user input that will never come.

The bad thing is that, as another commenter noted, these are usually the result of shoddy programming, & because the zombie is waiting for some specific event [which will never occur at this point] you can't kill it because the program is blocked on waiting for that other input. Bummer.

On the other hand, a program in this state consumes almost no system resources, so it's not that bad. They consume almost no ram, by definition they consume no CPU time, etc. So yeah, if you want to kill them off you have to reboot, but they're more annoying than harmful -- if you want you can just leave them around until the next time you would have had to reboot anyway.



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