On Saturday, Apr 5, 2003, at 15:16 US/Pacific, Justin Walker wrote: 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. You might find that this process's PPID is 0 ... in some older NIX's, the per process data area (1 page), and the process slot were all that remained. I had a similar issue a few days ago with an Applescript, it was a zombie, owned by root, with a PPID of 0 ... I rebooted the system to clear it as the Applescript would not run. It should have been owned by me (501), with a PPID of either 1 or an existing parent process. I do not know if this is expected behavior with OS X, and have yet to peruse the source to check. ps -lp PID for the PPID regards -- email: philip_parker@mac.com #include <std_disclaimer> _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.