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PPID is the PID of the parent process which invoked the zombie child process. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. The fourth column is the parent's PID, the tenth column is the child process status (obviously you’d be looking for PIDs in a Z state), and the thirteenth column is the child process. When a process dies, it's child processes all become children of process number 1, which is the INIT process. If the parent does not collect the exit status then the zombie processes will stay around forever. When this happens, I get a zombie process (the one I was debugging) that looks really strange. window won't close after I kill all wine processes, if I run ps, there They are only listed in the process table which could not be properly updated at the time the zombie process finished running.

I've had this happen on my ESX servers (which are linux under the hood) from time to time and a host reboot is the fix (from VMware support).I just had this issue, where I'm running wine Kindle, and the Kindle Anybody can ask a question The best answers are voted up and rise to the top So the only solution is to reboot. If it doesn't do it, noone else will.

Using the parent PID in column four, you can now go kill that parent process, and its zombie children will also go away. Since the parent is init (pid 1), that would also take down your system.Check if the process is in "D" Unkillable sleep, where it's in kernel mode for some syscall which has not returned yet (either kernel oops, or some other reason) This will show the pid of the of the parent of the zombie process.

List the PID of Zombie…? I launched my program in the foreground (a daemon program), and then I killed it with If the zombie is a dead process (already killed), how I remove it from the output of A zombie is already dead, so you cannot kill it. It only takes a minute to sign up.I am running Bacula on a RedHat box. :)"Since the parent is init (pid 1), that would also take down your system" - You cannot kill @AndrewH I'm not sure SIGKILL depends on a signal handler in the target process, but it's true that the typical kernel will ignore a SIGKILL to init. How can I kill a process like that? A defunct process will sometimes hang on to system resources, like andreash has clearly documented.In his case, per the lsof output, the zombie process is eating the brains of /dev/nst0. I have ssh-agent defunct and ssh nor git cannot run properly.
This is also the reason why they are not assigned to any meaningful parent.
Usually, a parent process keeps a check on the status of its child processes through the wait() function. But killing the parent is not recommended. One of the roles of init is to clean up zombies. Discuss the workings and policies of this site

it is a perfectly normal state and every process usually spends an infinitesimal amount of time, just before it can rest in peace....Parents who outlive, yet forsake their children and move on to other things, will damn the children to be stuck in the quasi-dead state of a zombie. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. And I just killed it using -9 instead of -1 : kill -9 {the parent id} Sometimesthe 4th field is the parent process, kill all of a zombie's parents and the zombie dies!Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow! If your parent spawns only a small, fixed number of children; does not care when or whether they stop, resume, or finish; and itself exits quickly, then you do not need to use wait() or waitpid() to clean up the child processes. Your daemon should notice when its children die and An example of how you might send a signal to every process that is the parent of a zombie (note that this is extremely crude and might kill processes that you do not intend. As far as I know the only way to kill these would be to reboot the box. How many zombie processes Ubuntu can handle?You cannot create a zombie process. You Cannot kill something that is already dead. The zombie is already dead.AFAICS, this command doesn't kill the zombie, but sends SIGHUP to its parent process (presumably killing the parent if it doesn't handle SIGHUP and causing the zombie to be reparented to init, as described in the previous answer). i did "kill -HUP processID" and the process is still there as a zombie@WilliamPursell when you answer a question, please describe the consequence of using the command line and what it does explicitly because it does kill all the programs running on the computer.im my case the zombie was creating via a start-up script and a program which was not clearly removed so I cleared it .Worked for me. In order to kill these processes, you need to find the parent process first. ;)Assuming you have process producing a lot of zombies it makes sense to 'uniq' the ids: Just imagined non-IT people coming here and reading this.