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This is perhaps related to the question posted here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/356722/killing-a-defunct-process-on-unix-system

I cannot seem to kill Zotero after it crashes and I "Force Quit" through the GUI interface. 

crippledlambda       1934   0.0  0.0        0      0   ??  ?E   18Mar13   0:00.00 (zotero-bin)
crippledlambda      55855   0.0  0.0  2434892    572 s001  S+    9:20AM   0:00.00 grep -i zotero

The process also does not appear in my Activity Monitor.

I'm not sure how to go about killing the parent or child process from what is described here:

https://serverfault.com/questions/12503/what-is-a-zombie-process-and-how-do-i-kill-it

Anyone have any advice?

EDIT kill -9 {PID} doesn't work because it's apparently a zombie process.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

You can use the kill command to quit the processes. For example:

sudo kill -9 1934 55855
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3
  • Thanks- I forgot to add that it's a zombie process, so you can't kill it because it's already dead. My question is now edited to reflect that.
    – hatmatrix
    Mar 30, 2013 at 8:59
  • 1
    In that case you would have to kill the parent process. You can run "ps -p <pid> -o ppid=" to determine the parent pid. If the parent pid is not 1 then you can kill -9 the parent. If it is 1 (launchd) then you can try to restart it "sudo kill -1 1"
    – User123456
    Mar 30, 2013 at 16:06
  • Thanks, parent id is not 1 but a larger number, but when I look for the name of the process it is indeed /sbin/launchd. I killed it but didn't restart...everything just froze and I had to force shutdown. But I appreciate your help- this is what I was looking for in this question.
    – hatmatrix
    Mar 31, 2013 at 2:01

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