Re: is killing zombies possible w/o a reboot?

[Måns Rullgård]

Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Wednesday 03 November 2004 12:44, DervishD wrote:
>>    Hi Gene :)
>>
>> * Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx> dixit:
>>> >    Or write a little program that just 'wait()'s for the
>>> > specified PID's. That is perfectly portable IMHO. But I must
>>> > admit that the preferred way should be killing the parent.
>>> > 'init' will reap the children after that.
>>>
>>> But what if there is no parent, since the system has already
>>> disposed of it?
>>
>>    Then the children are reparented to 'init' and 'init' gets rid
>> of them. That's the way UNIX behaves.
>
> Unforch, I've *never* had it work that way.  Any dead process I've 
> ever had while running linux has only been disposable by a reboot.

That's because its parent was still sitting around refusing to wait()
for them.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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