Unkillable zombie sshd-s?

[Lars Eighner]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Ivan Voras wrote:

> Mark Andrews wrote:
>>> Is there a way to find out what has happened and why does the situation 
>>> occur? (I can't reboot the server for testing)
>> 
>> 	You can't kill them because they are already dead.  They
>> 	are just holding state so that the parent process can know
>> 	how they died.  Once the parent process wait()'s on them
>> 	(or the parent dies) they will disappear.
>
> I knew that (except the bit that they're ukillable by design :) ), but I was 
> hoping it's a known ssh problem - this is the first time I saw sshd processes 
> as zombies (and it seems they've been zombies for a long time, so parents are 
> probably in error).
>
> Can I find out what their parent processes are? (something like tree-shaped 
> ps?)

No tree, but try ps -axl.

PPID = parent process ID

-- 
Lars Eighner
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