Why doesn't kill work?

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sun, 2005-02-20 at 22:38, James McKenzie wrote:
> Jesus M. Rodriguez wrote:
> > Try kill -9 <pid>  sometimes kill doesn't work.  When in doubt -9 it :)
> > Works everytime.  CTRL+Z simply puts it into the background.
> 
> I try in order:
> 
> kill <pid>
> kill -2 <pid>
> kill -15 <pid>
> kill -9 <pid>
> 
> However this would not kill a DEFUNCT process.  Anyone got an idea on 
> how to do this?

A defunct process is also called a zombie.  You can not kill something
that is already dead.  :)

Such processes usually result from the parent being killed or exiting
with out sending the exit code to the child process.  

As far as  know these will hang around until you reboot the system. 
Would be good to try to identify the program that is generating the
zombies and see if there is a fix.  It really should clean up after
itself.
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