Important Notice: We're experiencing email notification issues. If you've posted a question in the community forums recently, please check your profile manually for responses while we're working to fix this.

On Monday the 3rd of March, around 5pm UTC (9am PT) users may experience a brief period of downtime while one of our underlying services is under maintenance.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

How to clear Acroread defunct process in Linux?

Martin AA6E
Martin AA6E
more options

Acrobat Reader plugin works fine for first document, but if I close the pdf window and wait ~20 seconds, the Acroread process goes defunct and further attempts to read pdf docs do not display (blank screen). Have tried disabling all other plugins and many extensions. Killing nspluginwrapper manually allows proper pdf reading (for one more doc). This has been going on for a number of Firefox releases.

ps info: 11976 ? Sl 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/plugin-container /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.nppdf.so -greomni /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/omni.jar 11767 true plugin 11989 ? S 0:01 \_ /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer.bin --plugin /opt/Adobe/Reader9/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so --connection /org/wrapper/NSPlugins/nppdf.so/11976-2 12000 ? Z 0:01 \_ [acroread] <defunct>

The question: Is there something that can be done to fix the problem in Firefox or is it purely an Adobe problem?

Acrobat Reader plugin works fine for first document, but if I close the pdf window and wait ~20 seconds, the Acroread process goes defunct and further attempts to read pdf docs do not display (blank screen). Have tried disabling all other plugins and many extensions. Killing nspluginwrapper manually allows proper pdf reading (for one more doc). This has been going on for a number of Firefox releases. ps info: 11976 ? Sl 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/plugin-container /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.nppdf.so -greomni /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/omni.jar 11767 true plugin 11989 ? S 0:01 \_ /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer.bin --plugin /opt/Adobe/Reader9/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so --connection /org/wrapper/NSPlugins/nppdf.so/11976-2 12000 ? Z 0:01 \_ [acroread] <defunct> The question: Is there something that can be done to fix the problem in Firefox or is it purely an Adobe problem?

All Replies (1)

Forrest Sheng Bao
Forrest Sheng Bao
more options

I remember this has been a problem since Ubuntu 9.10 (maybe). It seems that Firefox 3.0+ has a non-robust interface with Adobe PDF reader. Chrome doesn't have this problem on Linux. So I guess the problem is in the plug-inn wrapper. I think Firefox team need to fix this problem ASAP.

Modified by Forrest Sheng Bao