detecting zombie processes

Question

how do I detect and kill zombie processes left from the command line of a Linux terminal?

You can't kill the undead :P. Zombie process are dead process that are waiting to be "waited" with the parent process. In this process the parent knows how their children ended. When ever the terminal ends, this process will be inherit by init and init will "wait" them. So what you need is to kill/end the parent process.

AndreKR · Answer 1 · 2011-04-28 15:10:40Z

up vote 3 down vote

You cannot kill a zombie process. If the parent process does not call wait(), you have to kill the parent process to remove the zombie.

answered Apr 28 '11 at 15:10

AndreKR
1683

Heisenbug · Answer 2 · 2011-04-28 15:09:42Z

up vote 0 down vote

Try:

ps aux

and look at the status column. Zombie are represented by letter Z.

answered Apr 28 '11 at 15:09

Heisenbug
413211

user31894 · Answer 3 · 2011-04-28 15:10:30Z

up vote 0 down vote

You can grep for "defunct", or check for Z in the "state" output

ps -eo state,pid,cmd | grep "^Z"

If you want to kill it as well

ps -eo state,ppid | awk '$1=="Z"{cmd="kill -9 "$2;system(cmd) }'

answered Apr 28 '11 at 15:10

user31894
1,23734

migrated from stackoverflow.com Apr 28 '11 at 16:00