[wplug] kill QUESTION -> mount question

[Brandon Kuczenski]

> Robert E. Coutch wrote:
> 
> > Is there a way to get rid of a sleeping or zombie process other than by a 
> > reboot?
> 
> Generally, no. However, zombie processes consume no resources. The 
> zombie state is when a process has completely terminated and all 
> resources have been freed except the processes entry in the process 
> table. This is usually a very short term event, because on exit, the 
> process sends a signal to the parent indicating that it has terminated 
> and the parent processes frees the remaining resources.

This relates to my lost CUPS question from a week ago.  I had a process (a 
print job) that had become unresponsive, but was certainly consuming 
resources.  It was writing a log to the tune of 400 kb per minute, and 
didn't respond to kill commands.  In fact, it couldn't even be stopped by 
a shutdown -r command!

Unfortunately, I panicked a little bit (the constant log writing was
consuming CPU time and the HDD was running constantly) and shutdown
without gathering more information about the situation that may have been
helpful now (like 'ps -ef > bad_process' )

But I would *really* like to know what to do the next time that happens, 
because the other solution -- just not printing anything ever again -- is 
just too windows-like for comfort.

-Brandon