[plug] defunct process won't die

[Steve Grasso]

David,

Ummm....on reflection, my last post was probably a bit brief.
Your question really relates to a similar question "How do I kill a zombie
process"

The short answer is find its parent (with ps -fauwx) and kill it. If it
appears to have no parent, that's because init has taken over from the
slovenly parent who is no longer talking to the child. Sending a hangup to
init (kill -s SIGHUP 1) should clean up the zombie.

Steve

On Wed, 09 Aug 2000, David Griffiths wrote:
> I'm having trouble killing a couple of netscape processes after a netscape
> 4.51 crashed on me.
> 
>    # ps ax|grep netsca
> 
>    21989 ?        DW     0:24 [netscape-commun]
>    21999 ?        Z      0:00 [netscape-commun <defunct>]
> 
> All the things that usually work for me have no effect on these pids (kill
> -9 etc) and one seems to be taking up some cpu time. (Netscape app not
> running at this point.)
> 
> Does anyone know how to nail these critters without a reboot?
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Dave.
> 
> 
> 
>  ========================================================================
> 
>   David Griffiths                             griffith at environ.wa.gov.au
> 
>   Air Quality Management Branch
>   Department of Environmental Protection          Phone:   61 8 9222 7151
> 
>   Westralia Square                                Fax  :   61 8 9321 5184
>   141 St Georges Tce
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