Reaping zombie processes

[Arthur David Olson]

We're running SunOS 4.0 (plus the "general hygiene" patches) on a 3/280.
I was interested in learning just what an <exiting> process was, so I
tried using "gcore" to get a dump.  Serendipitously enough. . .

    elsie$ /bin/su
    Password:
    elsie# ps -l#22255
          F UID   PID  PPID CP PRI NI  SZ  RSS WCHAN    STAT TT  TIME COMMAND
       8601   0 22255     1  0   3  0  48    0 lbolt    S    h4  0:00 <exiting>
    elsie# kill -9 22255
    elsie# ps -l#22255
          F UID   PID  PPID CP PRI NI  SZ  RSS WCHAN    STAT TT  TIME COMMAND
       8601   0 22255     1  0   3  0  48    0 lbolt    S    h4  0:00 <exiting>
    elsie# gcore 22255 &
    [1]     26519
    elsie# [1] + Stopped(tty output)      gcore 22255 &
    %1
    gcore 22255
    gcore: 22255 exiting - not dumped
    elsie# ps -l#22255
          F UID   PID  PPID CP PRI NI  SZ  RSS WCHAN    STAT TT  TIME COMMAND
    elsie# exit
    elsie$ exit

Of course this gcore behavior probably changes in 4.0.1 or 4.1.
-- 
	Arthur David Olson    ado at ncifcrf.gov    ADO is a trademark of Ampex.

[[ I wouldn't be so sure.  An exiting process usually doesn't even have
any allocated memory left to gcore.  --wnl ]]