Hi
> I've got hundreds of these bogging down my machine:
>
> bradyh   28812  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Mar22   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
> bradyh   28813  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Mar22   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
> bradyh   28814  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Mar22   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
> bradyh   28815  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Mar22   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
> bradyh   28816  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Mar22   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
> bradyh   28817  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Mar22   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
> bradyh   28818  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Mar22   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
> ...
>
> Is there any way to get rid of them aside from rebooting?  No form of kill
seems to work on them.


Zombies will be cleaned up if their parents die. So a zombie can be removed
by killing the parent process of the zombie. A parent process can be found
with ps -fauwx and so kill the parent of the zombie process (often a SIGHUP
is all that is needed).

In theory, the only processes that this will never be able to be applied to
is the stuff like init and other stuff started by the kernel that you have
no power over.

If it is a process that seems to have no parent, kill -s SIGHUP 1 (sending a
hangup to init) will probably clean up a zombie.

Otherwise just kill the parent of the zombie process and all should be fine
again.

Hopes this helps

truely
kasi viswanath

>
> Thanks,
> Brady
>
>
>
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