Author: Ruslan Dzhumaiev

Not so rarely we can see zombie processes, let’s try to solve this issue

~$ ps -elf | grep Z
F S UID PID PPID C PRI NI ADDR SZ WCHAN STIME TTY TIME CMD
0 Z lab4 11359 11051 0 80 0 - 0 - May07 ? 00:00:00 [bash]
0 Z lab4 11595 11051 0 80 0 - 0 - May07 ? 00:00:00 [bash]
0 S lab4 21612 15556 0 80 0 - 3284 pipe_w 08:45 pts/7 00:00:00 grep --color=auto Z

Now we can try to kill these process:

~$ kill -9 11359

~$ kill -9 11595

if we get the not successful result and still seeing the same zombie process, then we have to try kill parent process by these zombie process

in our case it is PPID 11051:

~$ kill -9 11051

The result is like as we have expected:

~$ ps -elf | grep Z
F S UID PID PPID C PRI NI ADDR SZ WCHAN STIME TTY TIME CMD
0 S lab4 23468 15556 0 80 0 - 3284 pipe_w 09:12 pts/7 00:00:00 grep --color=auto Z

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