On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 15:49:02 +0530, Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@thenilgiris.com wrote:
On Monday 17 Jan 2005 3:18 pm, Vinayak Hegde wrote:
In repeat my answer again. A zombie process is just a process table entry and a process which is dead quite some time ago. so $ kill -9 $pid will not work.
i have faced this problem with apps like kppp. As known, kppp needs root access to run. When it dies (due to line fault or something) on a non-root desktop, it becomes a zombie. The zombie on the desktop can be killed with the skull. But trying to run kppp again will not work until i go to .kde/share/apps/kppp and rm kppp.pid.
Yeah you are right. Some apps use a "lock file". Before starting up and initialising all the data structures, they will look if this "lock file" is present. If it is present, it will exit. Some apps will print their pid in the "lock file" as well. KPPP is one such app.
Do an strace on the application while running it and see the output. That should tell you what file on disk it is trying to stat()/open().
:) cheers Vinayak