[CentOS] Bullet proof cron job???

[William L. Maltby]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 11:17 +0100, Will McDonald wrote:
> On 22/09/06, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 22:14, Ted Miller wrote:
> > > I have a cron job that runs once a day.  There are times when it runs that
> > > it disrupts other things on the computer, so I want to kill it.  Under
> > > Mandriva I had no problems killing the process, and that was the end of
> > > that.  Under Centos I cannot kill it with a sig 15 or a sig 9.<snip>

> I've seen zombied processes in the past that have been impossible to kill.

Linux can't be that far removed from other *IX systems, can it? A
Zombied process is one that is dead already. But the parent has not
processed the "death of child" (usually/always(?) because the parent is
dead or sleeping while waiting for some event that never comes.

Regardless, the zombie should be scary but really harmless, no? It can
do nothing.

Being an older-timer, I'm subject to correction, of course.

> 
> http://www.sm.luth.se/~alapaa/file_fetch/unixcdbookshelf/upt/ch24_19.htm
> 
> Is this process in state 'Z' under ps?

Nothing in there makes me thing otherwise: a zombie is only scary. Bugs
are, of course, excluded in this consideration.

> 
> Will.
> <snip sig stuff>

My *guess*, Will, is that some related process got orphaned and
overlooked when you/someone was trying to "terminate with prejudice" an
offensive act.

--
Bill