Dealing with an orphaned process

Orphaned processes are not common issues, but they do arise, and in order to deal with them, we must begin by matching the displayed PID or PPID with the ID used by the init process itself. Using ps will reveal that both have a PPID equal to 1 and being honest, you will probably realize that there is little difference between an orphaned process and a daemon process with the exception that an orphaned process arises out of error. So, the golden rule here is to remember that an orphaned process can be spotted using a relatively simple technique, and it can be killed in the standard way.

Orphans can arise for a number of reasons and, though they have been adopted by init, you will find that they are still executing commands. For this reason, orphaned processes are potentially dangerous as they continue to starve your system of resources. In some instances, having too many orphans can overload the init process and cause a system hang. This is not common, but...