Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwm.edu!wuarchive!texbell!texsun!csccat!camdev!sscott
From: sscott@camdev.UUCP (Steve Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Need help killing processes
Message-ID: <251@camdev.UUCP>
Date: 13 Mar 90 03:33:33 GMT
Reply-To: sscott@mot.com (Steve Scott)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Motorola Inc., Ft. Worth, Tx
Lines: 23

Recently, I noticed that my HP9000 320 machine was running quite
slowly.  Although I do not know for certain what the cause was (a
reboot cured all - 'til next time 8-)), I noticed that there were
8 cu sessions show "ps -ef" output.  These processes were executed
by folks not currently logged onto the system.  They had "valid"
PIDs but the PPIDs were 1 in all cases.  Okay, so what probably
happened was that whomever was using cu at the time logged out 
without going through the ~. sequence.  But, in attempting to
discover if this could be my problem, I further discovered that
I could not kill these processes.  Of course, I tried "kill -9 pid"
(as root) but the processes would not blow away.  So, I tried
sending a SIGCLD (kill -18 1) signal to init to see if it would
terminate the rogue cu processes.  No luck.  So, I am a little
confused.  I thought that root could kill ANY processes (including
init and swapper) but this appears to not be correct.  I have a
gut feeling that the zombie processes owned by root has something
to do with this problem.  But I am not sure

Any who, any ideas?

-- 
Steve Scott            UUCP: {texbell|texsun}!csccat!camdev!sscott
Motorola, Inc.         Internet : sscott@mot.com  Telephone : 1-817-232-6317