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Bobby Jack
Asked: 2016-03-10 03:14:02 +0800 CST

Why is this process refusing to quit?

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I have a cron job that runs a shell script that executes a php script. It runs every day, sends some email, and writes to stdout (which is redirected to a log file in the shell script).

It looks as though this process has finished, today, but not exited (or whatever the correct terminology is!).

$ ps -ejH
...
10756 10756 10756 ?        00:00:00   sh
10760 10756 10756 ?        00:00:00     automail.sh
10766 10756 10756 ?        00:03:57       php
...

The process with id 10766 has consumed just under 4 minutes of CPU time. From an interactive top session, I get the following:

10766 root      20   0 40640 6024    4 S  0.0  0.2   3:57.48 php

Those hundredths haven't changed since I've looked at it. So my conclusion is that it's doing ... almost nothing, at the very most.

$ ls -ld /proc/10766/
dr-xr-xr-x 7 root root 0 2016-03-09 08:55 /proc/10766/

tells me it's been going for some time; server time is now:

$ date
Wed Mar  9 11:08:29 GMT 2016

The last line of the php script writes to a log file, and that line is present in the log file. Execution of the php script is the final thing in the shell script.

How do I go about diagnosing why this process hasn't quit?

UPDATE

Here's an edited version of the shell script I'm running:

#!/bin/sh

DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
PHP=/usr/bin/php
SCRIPT=/path/to/script.php
LOG=/path/to/log.file.$DATE.log

$PHP $SCRIPT >> $LOG
unix

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The process is listed as 'sleeping' not finished or zombied.

    10766 root      20   0 40640 6024    4 S  0.0  0.2   3:57.48 php

    Its stuck doing something, given you said it had read(4, ... in a strace output I'd say its probably waiting for the other end of a socket connection send it data. Like a website has given up sending you data.

    Thats a total guess though.

    There almost certainly should be a file descriptor for 4 which gives more information if you try lsof -p10756 and see what its up to.

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