[CentOS] Bullet proof cron job???

[Will McDonald]

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.  Tonight the
> > process would have trashed hours of work, so after spending two minutes as
> > root trying to kill the process, I ended up killing the entire tree,
> > including crond.  Linux is supposed to allow CONTROL of things like this
> > without rebooting, etc, so why can't I kill the process without killing crond?

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

http://www.sm.luth.se/~alapaa/file_fetch/unixcdbookshelf/upt/ch24_19.htm

Is this process in state 'Z' under ps?

Will.