a process which can not be killed?

[eugene_6]

-------------------------------
7419 ? 00:00:00 gaim
-------------------------------

i can't kill this process.
what happend?

i tried all signal..1-63

powerkill.sh
------------------------------

# kill process with signal 1-63
if(( $#<1))
then
echo "Usage: $0 pid"
exit 1
fi

pid=$1
let a=1
while (( a<64))
do
b=$b$a" "
let a=a+1
done

for i in $b
do
kill -s $i $pid
done

[eugene_6]

hmm
i found out this is so called 'zombie' process..

zombie = a process whose parent is dead..

what does 'dead' mean there?

i killed the zombie process by killing its parent process..

thx..

[Marco Paganini · Accepted solution]

Hello eugene,

If a process makes a system call and this system call gets blocked (let's say, because of a bug or waiting for a device to be available), you won't be able to kill the process (since the control is outside the process space).

In some cases, the only way is to reboot the server.

Regards,
Paga

[Marco Paganini]

Hello eugene,

If a process makes a system call and this system call gets blocked (let's say, because of a bug or waiting for a device to be available), you won't be able to kill the process (since the control is outside the process space).

In some cases, the only way is to reboot the server.

Regards,
Paga

[harry d brown jr]

I wonder what "lsof" would show on that process.

If the process isn't consuming any resources, then just ignore it, otherwise you will have to reboot to get it to go away.

live free or die
harry

[Volker Borowski]

Hi,

take care, NEVER kill the parent process if the PPID is "1".

:-)
Volker