Re: unkillable process ?
Re: unkillable process ?
- Subject: Re: unkillable process ?
- From: Justin Walker <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2003 15:16:32 -0800
On Saturday, Apr 5, 2003, at 14:52 US/Pacific, Jean-Edouard BABIN wrote:
I have an unkillable process also...
You can't kill what's already dead.
root 7040 0.0 0.0 0 0 con- Z 1Jan70 0:00.00
(iTunes)
# kill 7040
7040: No such process
This is what is known as a "zombie" process (that's what the 'Z' in the
status field means). A zombie process has exited, and no longer ties
up any system resources other than a slot in the process table. It has
no memory, no process id (that is useful), or anything else normally
associated with a process.
The only reason it is kept around is that the Unix kernel (Darwin)
wants to give its (the process's) status to the process's parent, if it
asks. Process status is given to the parent (or the 'init' process, if
the parent has exited) when that process executes a wait(3) system
call. At that point, the status is passed to the caller, and the
process slot is cleared out, and the process really goes away.
Quite stange no ? I never see that before
I think there a problem with ipod, itunes still work corectly but ipod
is
not recognized in it..
The existence of a zombie is not that strange; it's unusual, but not
unheard of. This could be a bug. You can file a report
(<
http://bugreport.apple.com>) or try to reproduce it and then file a
report.
You can determine the parent process's id by something like "ps -oppid
-aux", and the first column of the output will contain the process's
parent's pid.
You can try killing the parent, or just rebooting to see if the problem
recurs.
Regards,
Justin
--
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