Hi Gordon and all folks, Some time ago you gave me this answer (bellow) about the occurence of too many defunct processes in my system. I've been testing what you suggested, issue a kill -CONT at the PPID and it is working fine: the PPID exits and the defunct process is finally banished.
Actually, the processes that are getting defunct are pieces of shell scripts that run via CRON. Despite other guy on the list supposed, I'm not running interactive commands in background, at least they're not designed to be interactive. (in fact I'm not certain about what happens with error messages when something wrong occurs. I thought all messages to STDOUT and STDERR would be forwarded via e-mail to root - as normally happen to all my programms ran via CRON). For example, see the following line that is part of a greater shell script ran via CRON: PROCESS=`ps -ef | grep maildirserial | grep -v grep` The hole script executes succesfully, but, sometimes, one of these grep commands get defunct. (there were times that we had dozens of these grep commands remaining defunct) Why is it happening? And, what do you think about running via CRON, a script that automatically issues a -CONT signal to every process with a T state? Thank you very much, Bruno. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gordon Messmer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 6:15 PM Subject: Re: too many DEFUNCT processes On Fri, 2002-09-27 at 13:05, Bruno Negrao wrote: > I have a RedHat 6.2 and it isn't working fine. Look at how many defunct > processes are hanging around: ... > Does somenone could explain why is it happening? > > And the worst is that the parent processes of all this defunct childs still > remain in the system - with a T (stopped) status. It's happening because the parent is stopped ;) Give the parent a CONT(inue) signal to make it start again: kill -CONT <parent-pid> If that doesn't fix it, consider killing the parent with signal 9, and restarting it. If the parent is the init process (I've seen it happen once, and was probably related to glibc upgrade), you'll have to sync and power off to reboot. -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
