oprhan/zombie processes

[Aaron Konstam]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 09:14 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 12:55 +0000, tony.chamberlain at lemko.com wrote:
> >  
> > Someone requested a list of orphaned and zombie processes.  I know
> > that orphan processes have
> > PPID of 1 so I can 
> > 
> >      ps -aeo user,pid,ppid,stime,time,state,command | awk '($3=="1" ||
> > $6=="Z")'
> > 
> > But this will also print all system processes because they also have
> > PPID of 1.
> > How can I find just the orphan processes
> > (without | grep -v mgetty | grep -v init | grep -v this | grep -v that
> > | grep -v something_else | grep -v blahblahblah)?
> > -- 
> 
> "Zombie" is a well-defined process state (a process which is trying to
> die but hasn't yet been able to tell its parent), but "orphan" is an
> informal definition (a process with a dead parent, which is then adopted
> by init, and is not a zombie). Unless you can distinguish all processes
> which init "ought to have" and eliminate them from consideration,
> there's no way to distinguish.
> 
> p
> 
Something funny about this discussion. Using ps, Zombie processes have a
Z in Process State Column.


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Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: akonstam at sbcglobal.net