[Techtalk] Weird interaction of zsh and mrxvt

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 10:15:14PM +0200, Wim De Smet wrote:
> 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.

The parent process of the zsh processes is "1", which means that they
are orphaned.  And they are taking up memory and pseudo-ttys as well as
PIDs.

And if there is a bug in mrxvt, then why does this problem not occur
when I use bash as my login shell?

Kathryn Andersen
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