On Unix and Linux operating systems, a zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table.
Oracle Solaris:
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Identify the process IDs of the defunct process
#ps -ecl|grep “Z”
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kill the defunct process with “preap” command
#preap <PID>
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If there are multiple zombi processes then use this command to kill all processes at once.
#ps -A | grep defunct | awk ‘{print $1}’ | xargs preap
Linux:
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Identify the process IDs of the defunct process
#ps -A -ostat,ppid | grep -e ‘[zZ]’
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kill the defunct process with “kill” command
#kill -9 <PID>
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If there are multiple zombi processes then use this command to kill all process at once.
#for i in $(ps -A -ostat,ppid | grep -e ‘[zZ]’| awk ‘{ print $2 }’); do kill -9 $i; done
HP-UX:
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Identify process IDs of the defunct process
#ps -el | grep ‘Z’
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kill defunct process with “kill” command. But first, check zombi process parent ID
#ptree <PID>
#kill -9 <PID> //some cases this action doesn’t work . You need to kill parent ID. But be carefull when you kill parent ID.
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If there are multiple zombi processes then use this command to kill all processes at once.
#for i in $(ps -el | grep ‘Z’|grep -v PID|awk ‘{print $4}’); do kill -9 $i; done // be carefull before run command.
