[ale] Boot script becomes a zombie?

[Lightner, Jeff]

In that situation sometimes (though not always) killing the parent will
get rid of the zombie.

As an HP presenter used to say at the start of his performance
presentations:
You can't kill a zombie because IT'S ALREADY DEAD!

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
Michael H. Warfield
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2010 2:29 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Cc: mhw at wittsend.com
Subject: Re: [ale] Boot script becomes a zombie?

On Sun, 2010-02-21 at 23:05 -0500, James Sumners wrote: 
> I have a script that looks runs several other scripts in turn. I use
> this script to startup several FastCGI processes. This is the script:

> ##########
> #!/bin/bash
> find /var/www/fastcgi/scripts/ -type f -execdir '{}' 2>&1 1>/dev/null
\;
> return $?
> ##########

> I then have the following crontab entry for root:
> @reboot /path/to/boot_cgi_bin.sh

> Every time I reboot my server, this boot_cgi_bin.sh script turns into
> a zombie (the cgi bins do get started). Does anyone see a reason why
> this script would hang up as a zombie process?

A zombie process means that process terminated but the process (which
would seem to be cron in this case) which started it has not reaped the
child's status.  It's really all gone and only exists as an entry in the
proc table.  This CAN happen if a child it invokes leaves it's file
descriptors open and they're pipes back to the parent (it's what causes
ssh to refuse to terminate after running a script which restarts
services.).  I had to deal with that in the smbmount program when I was
maintaining it.

Do a ps -lp {process id} on that process id and then see what the parent
process is (may be a shell).

Might also redirect stdin from /dev/null just in case one of those
scripts you're invoking is doing something funny with stdin.

Mike
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