clocker1996
12-20-2001, 05:57 PM
Hi
I have this process, that came out of no where
nobody 24298 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Dec18 0:00 [sendmail <defunct>]
I can't seem to kil lit
I run killall -9 sendmail
it is still there no matter what
kill -9 #PID
still same thing
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail stop
same thing
cd /usr/sbin/
mv sendmail badmail
killall -9 sendmail
ps -ef | grep sendmail
SAME thing
this is confusing
What can i do? other than reboot
ffeingol
12-20-2001, 06:03 PM
It's a defunct process, so it may not respond to any kill commands.
You can try:
kill -15 #PID
Frank
ffeingol
12-20-2001, 06:39 PM
I did not think it would kill. Defunct/zombie process won't usually go away. OTOH, it's not really consuming any resources :D.
Frank
tariehk
12-20-2001, 07:02 PM
What type of process is this?
clocker1996
12-21-2001, 01:13 AM
uh
a "sendmail" process ??
Can anyone else help?
RutRow
12-21-2001, 06:40 AM
Zombie processes aren't something to worry about unless you have a lot of them. They do not use any system resources. Basically it is waiting for the parent process to check the exit status of the program it called, in your case sendmail. If you want to get rid of the zombie, you will have to kill the partent process.
clocker1996
12-21-2001, 07:12 PM
so how do i do that?
I mean, there is only ONE one sendmail process
ONE
and its that defunct one
;/
and i cant kill it no matter what.
ffeingol
12-21-2001, 07:31 PM
Then I guess you'll have to reboot :-(
Frank
RutRow
12-21-2001, 07:50 PM
Then sendmail isn't the parent process. Some other program could just as well called sendmail.
I believe there is a command to find parent process and all its children. I've forgotten, though :(
ffeingol
12-21-2001, 07:55 PM
execute ps -ef | egrep "sendmail <defunct" and show the output. Then we'll be able to tell you the parent process.
Frank
clocker1996
12-21-2001, 07:59 PM
# ps -ef | egrep "sendmail <defunct"
nobody 24298 22643 0 Dec18 ? 00:00:00 [sendmail <defunct>]
RutRow
12-21-2001, 08:00 PM
Try running top. It should show you the PPID for your defunct process.
ffeingol
12-21-2001, 08:05 PM
22643 is the parent process. Now you can run:
ps -ef | egrep 22643
to see what that process is.
Frank
ffeingol
12-21-2001, 09:47 PM
Cool! Glad you got this resolved.
The way you read the ps output:
nobody 24298 22643 0 Dec18 ? 00:00:00 [sendmail <defunct>]
Is the user nobody is running the process. 24298 is the process id. 22643 is the processes parent id.
Since the user is nobody, I'm assuming this came from a web page.
Frank
