How to Identify & Kill Zombie Process in Linux

Zombie Process Definition in Linux

In conclusion, a zombie process in Linux is a terminated child process that remains in the system's process table while waiting for its parent process to collect its exit status. A zombie process is a type of process that has completed its execution but still has an entry in the process table.

What is zombie process in Linux?

In the world of Linux, a zombie process refers to any process that is essentially removed from the system as 'defunct', but still somehow resides in the processor's memory as a 'zombie'.

Step-01 Find Zombie Processes :-

 $ ps aux | egrep "Z|defunct"

 USER        PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

linuxdb  309480  0.0  0.0 112720  2248 pts/0    S+   09:36   0:00 grep -E --color=auto Z|defuct

polkitd  396842  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    Dec18   0:00 [pkla-check-auth] <defunct>

Step-02 Kill Zombie Processes :-

We can kill above process with two deferent way 

$ kill –s SIGCHLD  Parent_PID

OR

$ kill -9 Parent_PID