How to kill a defunct process

[Erick Amezquita]

Hi

At the moment I have 5 defunct process, and I need to kill them

Help me Please

Thanks

[Steven E. Protter]

Couple of ways.

ps -ef | grep defunct

kill -9 on the pid's returned.

if they are all on the same filesystem and nothing else is open.


fuser -cu /filesystem

to check

fuser -cuk /filesystem

Some defunct processes will only die with a reboot.

SEP

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Also you can look at the PID of these defuncts processes , sometimes killing the parent PID will stop the defunct stuff .



Manoj Srivastava

[Pete Randall]

Typically, the only way to get rid of a defunct process is to kill the parent. If the process is a true zombie, the parent will be 1 and you certainly don't want to kill the init process. A reboot is the only way to clear them.


Pete

[Dario_1]

Hi

If you can't kill them with kill -9 you will have to boot the box.

Regards,

DR

[Ross Zubritski]

ps -ef | grep ""

1. Try kill -15 (commit suicide)
2. If -15 doesn't work, last resort is kill -9(murder)
3. If that doesn't work, schedule an outage.

Regards,

RZ

[John Bolene]

Most defunct can't be killed as they are already dead and are called zombies.

They are just waiting to return a status to their parent which no longer exists. They will wait until the box is booted.