On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:10:34 -0600, Jeff Vian <jvian10@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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
