How to kill zombie process

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A zombie is already dead, so you cannot kill it. To clean up a zombie, it must be waited on by its parent, so killing the parent should work to eliminate the zombie. (After the parent dies, the zombie will be inherited by pid 1, which will wait on it and clear its entry in the process table.) If your daemon is spawning children that become zombies, you have a bug. Your daemon should notice when its children die and wait on them to determine their exit status.

An example of how you might send a signal to every process that is the parent of a zombie (note that this is extremely crude and might kill processes that you do not intend. I do not recommend using this sort of sledge hammer):

# Don't do this.  Incredibly risky sledge hammer!
kill $(ps -A -ostat,ppid | awk '/[zZ]/ && !a[$2]++ {print $2}')

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