On 05 Apr 2002 13:07:03 -0600 Brady Hegberg <bradyh at bitstream.net> wrote: > I've got hundreds of these bogging down my machine: > > bradyh 28812 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Mar22 0:00 [sh > <defunct>] > Is there any way to get rid of them aside from rebooting? No form of > kill seems to work on them. <plagarism> kill -9 doesn't help get rid of zombies. Nothing does. They are dead - hence the name. A process is only removed from the process table when it's parent (the process which created it) acknowledges its death. If the parent doesn't acknowledge the child's death, the child sits in the process table as a zombie. Normally the init process will reap zombies when the parent process dies, but this sometimes doesn't happen quite right. Zombie processes don't take up any resources (they are dead) except for an entry in the process table. As long as your process table isn't full, they are harmless. If your process table is full the only way to get rid of them is to reboot. If you are having constant problems you need to track down the process which is forking children but not reaping them and fix it. </plagarism> -.bill.layer.- .-frogtown.mn.usa.-