Once in a while you will see some strange processes with <defunct>

instead of a process name. This happens when a child process terminates,

but the parent process isnt interested in the outcome because it didnt
waited for the childs response. Almost all resources of the child process
are freed up at the moment with the exception of the entry in the process
table. The parent process need it to get the exit code from its child, thus
you cant simply delete it on the termination of the child. The remaining
process table entry will be delete, when the parent proccess reaps the
child process by gathering the exit code. But when the parent forgets to
reap the child, its undead, its defunct. Or to stay in the terminology:
Youve produced a Zombie process.

Lets create such a process. Its really easy, we just have to create a
long running process forking away a child but we dont use the wait()
system call to gather its response at the exit.
bash-3.2$ nohup perl -e "if (fork()>0) {while (1) {sleep 100*100;};};"&
Okay, lets check for our processes. In the output of ps -ecl the zombie
processes are marked with a Z:
bash-3.2$ ps -ecl |grep "Z"
F S UID PID PPID CLS PRI ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME
CMD
0 Z 100 27841 27840 - 0 - 0 - ? 0:00
<defunct>
bash-3.2$
A kill -9 to this process is without effect. Obviously, a zombie will go
away when you terminate the parent process, but that isnt alway an
option. How can you get rid of this Zombies? Okay, with Solaris you can
reap such processes manually. The preap forces the parent to reap the
child by calling wait() system call on the child.
bash-3.2$ preap 27841
27841: exited with status 0
And when you look in the process table again you will see, that the
zombie founds its peace...
bash-3.2$ ps -ecl |grep "Z"
F S UID PID PPID CLS PRI ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME
CMD
Obviously, you should ask yourself, why an application leaves such zombie
processes, when the task of reaping them away manually gets a frequent
task. Often its because of bad programming style.


==============================================
==============================================
How to kill a defunct process (most of the
time)
Defunct processes are processes that have become corrupted in such a way the no long can
communicate (not really the right word, more like signal each other) with their parent or child
process.
So kill the parent or child and 99% of the time (around here at least) the defunct process will go
away! No parent or child, you're out of luck, or look for a stuck automount.
#
# list detached non root processes on Solaris
#
clarion:/# ps -ef | grep -v \ \ root | grep -v pts/ | less
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
xxxxxx 168 1 0 Jan 13 ? 0:00 /usr/lib/nfs/statd
yyyy 28835 28789 0 Apr 07 ? 2:05 xbiff++
zzz 13868 1 0 0:00 <defunct>
aaaa 24724 24721 0 Apr 02 ? 0:02 /usr/openwin/bin/xload -hl red
-g
eom +396+26
nnnn 28789 28786 0 Apr 07 ? 0:00 /pkg/local/bin/tcsh -c xbiff++

# now use /usr/proc/bin/ptree to find parent or child
## Linux users might try ps -ef --forest | less

clarion:/# /usr/proc/bin/ptree 13868
13868 <defunct>
16596 a.out
clarion:/# kill -9 16596


# ta daa !
#
# or
#
bash# /usr/proc/bin/ptree `ps -ef | grep -v ^\ \ \ \ root | awk '/<defunct>/
{print $2}'` | less
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Killing zombie process
by NIX Craft on May 26, 2006 36 comments LAST UPDATED September 19, 2006
in FreeBSD, Linux, Troubleshooting
Zombie process is an inactive computer process, according to wikipedia article, "...On Unix
operating systems, a zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution
but still has an entry in the process table, allowing the process that started it to read its exit status.
In the term's colorful metaphor, the child process has died but has not yet been reaped..."
So how do I find out zombie process?
Use top or ps command:
# top
OR
# ps aux | awk '{ print $8 " " $2 }' | grep -w Z
Output:
Z 4104
Z 5320
Z 2945
How do I kill zombie process?
You cannot kill zombies, as they are already dead. But if you have too many zombies then kill
parent process or restart service.
You can kill zombie process using PID obtained from any one of the above command. For
example kill zombie proces having PID 4104:
# kill -9 4104
Please note that kill -9 does not guarantee to kill a zombie process (see below for more info).
How do I automate zombie process killing?
Write a script and schedule as a cron job.