On Saturday, Apr 5, 2003, at 16:46 US/Pacific, Philip Parker wrote: 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 [snip] 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 Yup; in fact that is the case. That's what happens when the parent exits and the child gets "attached" to init. I should have been more explicit in my comments above. ... 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. It is the case; and I think it's generally true (although I won't refund any money if I'm wrong :-}) on Unices. I believe that ownership stays valid. ps -lp PID for the PPID On my system (10.2.4), I get just the headline; the '-o' trick works for me. Regards, Justin -- /~\ The ASCII Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-at-Large \ / Ribbon Campaign X Help cure HTML Email / \ _______________________________________________ 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.