[Techtalk] Weird interaction of zsh and mrxvt

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Kathryn Andersen
<kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 06:57:28AM +1000, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
>> 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?
>
> Yes, definitely ORPHAN not ZOMBIE processes.  Sorry for my incorrect
> terminology.
>
> Any ideas how to deal with this?

Ah I see. Could be caused by mrxvt not properly killing the shell when
it shuts down, or zsh not taking the hint somehow. Personally I'd
report a bug on mrxvt in your distribution, don't think there's that
much you can do as a user and it might get fixed quite quickly if it
is a bug.

just my 2c,
Wim