[X-Unix] Zombies

[Gretchen Hayman]

On Jun 14, 2004, at 18:40, James Bucanek wrote:

>  I don't have any handy way of making a zombie process to test this,

Ah, now there's a helpful little script someone could write!  :)

> but what happens when you do a 'ps -lax' with zombies in the list?  
> What's the PPID listed for the zombies?

For my 10.3.4 (Build 7H63) Mac, I did 'ps -lax | less' just out of 
curiosity.  Lucky me!  I have a zombie!  And the command lists the PPID 
for it as well, which is not 0 in my case.

   UID   PID  PPID CPU PRI NI      VSZ    RSS WCHAN  STAT  TT       TIME 
COMMAND
   501   670   668   0   0  0        0      0 -      Z     ??    0:00.00 
(pap)

Before James mentioned this, though, I was thinking of pstree.  Of 
course, it doesn't come installed with OS X, but you can fink it.  It's 
kinda fun to play around with sometimes.

gretchen