[Techtalk] Weird interaction of zsh and mrxvt

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Kathryn Andersen
<kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org> wrote:
> I have had this problem which has been bugging me on and off for
> a while, where, when I quit my X session, I would have zombie zsh
> processes hanging around, that needed to be killed with kill -9 because
> they were ignoring the normal "kill" command.
>
> [...]
> But when I have zsh as my default shell AND I use mrxvt, AND I quit
> out of X without killing all the terminals first, I have zombie zsh
> processes.
> This happens whether or not I am using gdm or something else as my login
> manager.  This happens whether or not I am using XMonad or Fvwm as
> my window manager.
>
> It doesn't happen if I exit out of every terminal, but that's really
> annoying to have to do.
>
> I am baffled as to why this is happening, and I can't figure it out.
>
> Of course the obvious answer is "Don't do that then!" but I really like
> both zsh and mrxvt and I want to be able to use both of them!

There's not really a need to kill the zombie processes as they don't
use any resources to speak of (though if you have enough of them you
might run out of PIDs but I can't really think of anything else).
Zombies generally should still have parents about, which is probably
the real problem. Could you check with pstree what is still running?
Likely there's a bug in mrxvt.

regards,
Wim