A distributed system is much larger and more powerful than typical centralized systems due to the combined capabilities of distributed components. Examples of distributed systems include computer networks, distributed databases, distributed information processing systems and real time process control systems. Many challenging areas that span the middleware and language constructs, down to the implementation of the supporting application-level communication protocols and operating system mechanisms have drawn the attention of researchers in the area of distributed systems. The control tasks of operating systems and database systems like mutual exclusion, deadlock and concurrency control, are much more difficult to solve in distributed systems than in a centralized systems. This paper addresses various issues associated with one of the fundamental resource management problems, the deadlock.