I am using Geany for editing a large text data in Ubuntu (600MB or so). But after a while, a zombie process starts whenever I start Geany and it couldn't load the file so that I edit the content. It took 100% of my CPU while Geany runs. I try to kill the zombie process with the following:
kill -HUP `ps -A -ostat,ppid,pid,cmd | grep -e '^[Zz]' | awk '{print $2}'`
But once I start the application again, the zombie process starts automatically. Also tried logout.
What can I do to kill the zombie process once and for all? Thanks!
You can't kill a zombie process since it's already dead.
On Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution (via the exit system call) but still has an entry in the process table: it is a process in the "Terminated state".
(from Wikipedia)
It's simply an entry in the process table with no associated process. It exists because the spawning (parent) process has yet to collect the return status (via wait()). Other than that it will consume no resources.
So I suspect the parent process is either busy or not working properly. I would first of all try to identify that process (via the PPID column in ps, for example)
EDIT: I note there's a geany issue raised/resolved around this