On Friday 12 August 2005 12:08 am, peeyush kr wrote: > Hi friends, > > I want to know about the process that run in the background. > there are three processes 1.active 2.sleep 3. zombi When a process is active then it is actually executing on the CPU. An active process has it's program code loaded into RAM. When a process is sleeping, then it is not executing. Instead it is waiting for something to happen. It may be waiting for the disk controller to read data off of the hard disk, or it may be waiting for data to arrive on the ethernet port. A process can sleep for many different reasons. A process that is sleeping may have it's code and data moved out of RAM and onto the swap partition if it has been waiting long enough. A zombie process is one that has already terminated and been unloaded from RAM, so it isn't using your memory. But it is still listed in the process list because no one has checked its return value yet. (The return value is stored in the process table entry, so that entry has to be kept around until the return value is checked, even if the process itself is already unloaded from RAM.) Normally a zombie process will disappear very quickly because the init process itself will remove it if no other program checks the return value. If the zombie stays around, then it is usually because its parent process is still running, but is not checking the return value. In that case you have to kill the parent in order to kill the zombie. Eris Caffee -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
