[ILUG] killing a process

[Kenn Humborg]

On Mon, May 15, 2000 at 10:39:55AM +0100, John P. Looney wrote:
> On Mon, May 15, 2000 at 10:13:56AM +0100, Donncha O Caoimh mentioned:
> > grrr.. named has crashed on me somehow and I can't kill it. I blame the
> > excessive number of expect scripts that had stalled. 
> > anyway, the following didn't work:
> > /etc/rc.d/init.d/named stop
> > kill -9 2170
> > killall -9 named
> 
>  If kill -9 doesn't kill it, it's a Zombie, and it's not got any
> sockets/ports open anyway. Just start a new named.

And, if you want to be tidy about it:  A Zombie is a process which
has exited and said to its parent "Hey you - I'm dead, my exit
code is <whatever>".  Until the parent actually responds to this
signal and 'reaps' the exit code, the child process stays as a
zombie.  

So there is a good chance that named's parent process has locked up.
If you kill the parent, the zombie named will become an orphan and
will be taken in by init (pid 1).  Init will then be a responsible
parent and accept named's exit code and named can finally die.

So use pstree -p to find the parent of that named and nuke it.
But NOT if the parent is already init :-)

Later,
Kenn