🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov10.152955.21859@menudo.uh.edu> sears@tree.egr.uh.edu writes:
>In article <1dmp94INNppe@uwm.edu> xepo@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Scott R Violet)  
>writes:
[stuff deleted]
>=>After that if I do a 'ps -aux' I notice that there is a extra -1 task
>=>running under root.  What could cause this problem?  And, I found out
>=>that it isn't a good idea to try an kill them...
>=>		-Scott Violet (xepo@csd4.csd.uwm.edu)
>
>A process with a PID of -1 (also stated as <mnach-task>) is really a zombied  
>process.  A zombie doesn't not really cause any harm to the system, except  
>that it consumes 1 slot in the process table, of which there is a finite  
>number of slots.  When you run out of process slots, you will crash.

Yes, there is a finite amount of them, but it's only limited by the
memory you have (it's not an arbitraty limit such as '128 processes').

>Btw, the zombies can not be "killed" (even will kill -9).  Don't even bother  
>to attempt it.  But if you do, be prepared to reboot from a panic :-)

If you try to kill processes with negative PIDs, you won't kill them,
but you will kill the process group with the corresponding positive
ID. As a speciale case, -1 refers to every process owned by you (root:
every process), except the process sending that signal (but, of course
including its parent processes, such as Stuart or Terminal).
Therefore, you won't get the expected result when killing -1.

-Marcel