Quick Tips – Killing Zombie Processes
This will be a regular feature (I hope). Quick tips are brief descriptions of a common problem and a solution.
The first is how to kill zombie processes.
A zombie process is a child process that has died without the parent’s knowledge or acknowledgement.
To kill it send a signal SIGCHLD to the parent process.
kill -SIGCHLD processID
If this fails you will need to kill the parent process directly.
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