Why doesn't kill work?

[Deron Meranda]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:10:34 -0600, Jeff Vian <jvian10 at charter.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 00:21 -0500, Deron Meranda wrote:
> NOT always.  Some processes leave zombies that last forever (until the
> next reboot).

No, zombies are not permanent.

Zombies will *always* disappear as soon as their parent process
wait()s on them, or their parent process dies too.  It's not necessary
to reboot (although a reboot certainly will work too).  How long a
zombie sticks around depends only upon it's parent process.

Are you perhaps thinking of a process that's hung in a kernel-locked
mode (uninterruptable sleep state, indicated by a "D" in the ps output)?
Those processes generally can not be killed except by reboot, or if
whatever they were blocked on becomes available again.  But they are
most definitely not zombie (defunct) processes.

-- 
Deron Meranda