On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Daniel Patrick Berdine wrote: > Is there any way to kill a process that kill -9 <pid> won't remove > without rebooting?
No. If kill -9 won't kill it there are only three possible causes. 1) The process is a zombie. (It will be marked with a 'Z' in ps). A zombie is a process which has exited but whose parent has not wait()'ed for it yet. Zombie processes take up no resources other than the slot in the process table, so don't worry about this. Once the parent wait()s or exits the zombie will go away on its own. 2) The process is blocked in a kernel system call. (These are marked with a 'D' in ps). Normally this is the result of a hardware problem, removable media media not ready or a down NFS link mounted "hard." 3) Kernel bug :}
