Defunct

[merwa]

Hi
What is a defunct process?Ur ans is appreciated

 

[KenCunningham]

These are usually child processes whose parent has died, thus leaving them nowhere to 'report back to' and consequently not enabling them to die gracefully too. They are not a problem as long as there aren't too many of them. A reboot will generally get rid of them, but do a keyword search for possible other methods. HTH.

 

[Annihilannic]

Not to be contradictory, but...

A defunct process is a process which has finished and attempted to report back to its parent before the parent is ready for a response (which could be never if the parent is buggy). If you kill the parent the defunct processes should go away.

I think that's a zombie you're describing Ken? Not sure though... Annihilannic.

 

[lfoata]

Not to be contradictory, but...


Even if you kill the parent, the defunct process may very well stay on the system. The only to get rid of them is a reboot. Too bad I.T. is not cash business

Luc Foata
Unix sysadmin, Oracle DBA

 

[KenCunningham]

Annihillanic, you're probably correct that I was thinking of zombies. Anyone else had probs getting on the site recently?

 

[Annihilannic]

Yes, they seem to be having some performance trouble. Maybe they should try UNIX? ;-)

Notice how much the readership has been increasing lately (shown on the home page)? Annihilannic.

 

[pderuiter]

Hmm,
You can kill the defunct processes with the following command
ps -ef|grep "process name"|awk '{print $2}'|xargs kill -15