dns2go client messed up somehow so i had to quit it then restart it. i push ctrl+z to stop it then i push up to start the process again "waiting for process 1492 to end" and it said the process was paused so i assumed that i never killed the program. look in my trusty manual to see what the kill command is, here are the commands i tried:
kill -signal 1492 //says that it does not understand the signal command even though my book says the command exists
killall -g dns2go //closes 1 process but not the other 7
exit //cannot log out, 8 processes are stopped
quit //does nothing

i tried kill -l and killall -l but NEITHER listed the dns2go process so how the hell am i supposed to log out!?!?!? if i can't kill the process then wtf do i do?

kill -9 pid will kill the program with no questions asked.

for more.. man kill

i typed man kill though and it dosen't have that command anywhere in there. my Linux In A Nutshell book doesn't have that either.

Run 'man 7 signal' to find out what all the signals are. 9 is equivalent to a SIGKILL. If you don't like remembering numbers you can also use the signal name.

kill -KILL 1492

The kill command is one of the bash builtins. Do a man bash and look for kill there. I guess mandrake decided to cut costs and not include a separate man page for kill.

I actually got 3 zombies that don't want to go to h****, even at my sweetest invitations.

a kill -s 9 PID
does nothing, the just keep hanging around.

I so far got everything killed with sigkill, but now I am baffled. What can I do? Do I have to restart the system, like a stupid Windows OS? (Would not like that, I got linux)
Don't want to follow the stupid advice of some moron Windows Admin "A reboot is always good".

Also sometimes a separate binary, your slack will have it, /bin/kill. Perhaps being specific /bin/kill -9 PID will work ?

kill -9 pid is a forced kill(kills it whether it likes it or not)so it should work

you gotta hate that windows memory management huh...


a program is not allowed to create a default disposition for a SIGKILL signal (as opposed to a SIGTERM signal)...thus it cannot handle the SIGKILL itself and it will die.

man 2 signal should teach you more about the way the signal works (if you are a C programmer)

have fun.

Uh.. you aren't typing in 'PID' are you. Substitute the process ID number.

ex.: kill -9 1234

i noticed kill doesn't do all that much for me most of the times, but i just dont use it anymore..
i just issue the command:
killall -15
or if that don't work, we'll make it work
killall -9

No, I am NOT, of course I am not using PID as PID number. I use the task number, the actual one. I got three tasks hanging around (state defunct), listed as zombies and all the bullets and sacred water does not do a damn.
I tried to kill them about 10 times already, and they won't leave. This is kind of getting tricky. I could do a reboot, but I am kind of curious how to solve this sucker.
Could I make them crash? Is there a way to do a segmentation fault on these programms? That they are removed by the system?

here's an interesting thought that I found here.

"A zombie process sticks around until either its parent dies without it being assigned a new parent or until its parent checks its exit status (the 'performing an autopsy' the previous poster mentioned).

The metaphor extends a bit more, because you can't kill a zombie process the way you can kill normal processes - because you can't kill something that's already dead =)"

That link seems to be mostly a discussion of metaphors, but I think the idea of the parent process keeping the affected process in existence may be apropos here.


Also,
OK, I thought so, but was just making sure.

Regards...

Yes, zombies cannot be killed because they are undead (you can't overkill something, if it is dead and you shoot it again, it doesn't change)

The thing is just that I don't like this thing at all. I remember having killed zombie processes before, but this time it just won't work. I always (so far) thought and hoped that linux is consistent, meaning that with - SIGKILL you can get rid of everything. I heard from somebody that sometimes you can't and did not believe/like it, because it scratches my vision of linux as an OS with non of these windows anomalies.
so I have found it then.
Anybody reading this knows how I sent these zombies to hell? Anything will do, overwrite their memory space, make them misbehave more that the OS will kick them out? Can I make them crash, remove them artificially from the process list, write some nasty stuff into /proc that will make the OS vomit them out?

I know I can reboot, but this is a challenge to me. There MUST BE A SOLUTION. In linux, there is always one. It is OPEN source, you can see inside, that's the thing.

Another thought: so, if I restart the system, it should hang with these processes, and not terminate, right? Since it cannot kill them with sigterm and sigkill, what else is there?

Not that I would know how to do it, but can't you affect the parent process in a way to make it terminate the undead (e.g. trying to reanimate them and failing...)? Good hunting .