How do you kill processes that are zombie (Z).
They don't respond to SIGTERM, SIGKILL or SIGHUP.
Is there a way to kill them defenitely?

Zombie's have a already been sent a kill so won't respond to more signals... The OS should clean them up once all their resources have been released. Have you had anything seg-faulting on you??

cheers

Jamie...

Don't know
Yesterday X showed up this way and also one process of sara, the security program. The X said X <defunkt> when running ps.

Do they appear to be using any resources? Or are they just hanging around in the process table? I can't say I've ever had problems with 'persistant zombies'... If they are waiting for resources that are being help by other processes then you may want to start killing of other processes to see if they will get cleaned up then... but I have no idea how you'd know which processes to kill off!! Is there any useful info available about the processes by looking at their entries in /proc??

good luck! If you do find out what caused them, and a 'nice' (read non-reboot) way to reape them I'd be interested in it.

cheers

Jamie...