when does kill -9 pid not work?

[David Goodenough]

dmt at PacBell.COM (Dave Turner) sez:
> In article <9748 at alice.UUCP> debra at alice.UUCP () writes:
>>when the process exits (due to the kill -9) it may get stuck in a device
>>driver or something, so it enters a "zombie" state. This means that the
>>process is busy exiting, but hasn't quite gone far enough to tell init that
>>it's really gone.
> 
> There are times when a process cannot be killed and does not enter the
> zombie state. It will not use cpu time and will live (in a coma) until
> the system is rebooted. I have seen this on other systems besides 3B20s.

Also processes that have exited & not been waited for: "<defunct>" can't
be removed with a kill -9. As Chris Torek, or Doug Gwyn, or someone said:
"There's no point shooting a corpse - it's already dead"
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