Dwight Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 15 Oct 2000, Matthew Emmett wrote: > > > When netscape screws up and dies, it sometimes leaves it's "dns > > helper" process, which takes up memory/swap. Does anyone know of > > a way to clean up these old netscape processes, without killing > > the netscape that is currently running? > > Launch top. The dead netscape is often still running like a chicken > with its head cut off and putting a dangerous load on the system.
Yeah, exactly. How very annoying. Okay, here's the situation: I'm configuring a machine that will act as a public access internet machine -- basically it just runs netscape and has some other nice software like xpdf etc etc. Users of this machine are not familiar with GNU/Linux at all. I want to make a cron job that will run peridocially and clean up those annoying netscape's that are bogging the system. I haven't figured out a recreatable way to get netscape to crash (any pointers on how to do so would be appreciated), so I can't test out my idea, but here is my idea so far: $ ps -o pid,ppid,cmd | grep "dns helper" tells me the pid and ppid of any "dns helper" netscape processes (and grep, but I'll filter that out). Next, I take all but the largest pid and kill it. This way, if the user's netscape died and they start a new one right away, my script will only kill those dead-chicken netscape's. Does this sound like it will work reliably? Thanks for your input, Matt
