Within one application, such as oracle, the background processes seem to be started in the order of pmon, dbwr, lgwr, ckpt, smon, reco according to PID (as you indicated). Whether oracle shuts down in reverse order is up to the program svrmgrl. For lack of source code, the only way to find out is by examining the output of truss (or strace) on svrmgrl - shutdown. Checking ps -ef (or ps -fp) rapidly doesn't catch it. What I find from truss svrmgrl - shutdown immediate is this sequence: kill reco, dbw0, lgwr, ckpt, reco, pmon (ESRCH), dbw0, lgwr, ckpt, smon (ESRCH), reco, pmon (ESRCH), dbw0 (ESRCH), lgwr (ESRCH), ckpt (ESRCH), smon (ESRCH), reco (ESRCH), where ESRCH means error "No such process" is returned; all other kill's return success. Yong Huang yong321 AT yahoo.com