killing zombies

[William LeFebvre]

We have also had the zombie process problem in the past.  And, like
most other sites, we have not found a cure-all way of getting rid of
the culprits.

We have found a method that sometimes works (or used to work---it's
been awhile since I have seen it work).  It was noted that some of the
zombies are only waiting for their output queues to drain before going
away.  So, we would turn on the LFLUSHO bit by typing
"stty flusho >/dev/ttyXX &".  Be *SURE* to put it in the background!
Because if the command does not succeed, you will have another zombie
process.  This would work sometimes, but not always.

What we would usually do is try that method, and if it didn't work,
wait until a sufficient number of them accumulated (or until a rather
inactive time of the day) and just reboot the machine.  It is a *very*
annoying terminal driver bug---one that I wish would be permanently
eradicated!

			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil at Rice.arpa>
                        or, for the daring: <phil at Rice.edu>