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7 Answers. A zombie is already dead, so you cannot kill it. To clean up a zombie, it must be waited on by its parent, so killing the parent should work to eliminate the zombie. (After the parent dies, the zombie will be inherited by pid 1, which will wait on it and clear its entry in the process table.)
How do I delete a defunct process in Linux?
You can follow below steps to attempt killing zombie processes without system reboot.
- Identify the zombie processes. top -b1 -n1 | grep Z. …
- Find the parent of zombie processes. …
- Send SIGCHLD signal to the parent process. …
- Identify if the zombie processes have been killed. …
- Kill the parent process.
How do you clean defunct processes?
The only way to get rid of defunct processes that is certain is to reboot the box. Another way that SOMETIMES gets rid of defunct processes is to do a kill of the PPID. In your case that would be PID 7755.
