How to find, count and kill 🐧 Zombie Processes

If you have zombie processes it means those zombies have not been waited for by their parent (look at PPID displayed by ps -l). You have two choices:

• Fix the parent process (make it wait);
• Kill the parent; or live with it.

Remember that living with it is not so hard because zombies take up little more than one extra line in the output of ps.

How to find all Zombie processes

# ps aux |grep Z

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
arun      3366  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    07:34   0:00 [chromium-browse] 
arun      3435  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    07:44   0:19 [chromium-browse] 
arun      3722  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    08:21   0:00 [pidgin] 
arun      4287  0.1  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    09:26   0:38 [chromium-browse] 
arun      5378  0.1  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    11:24   0:15 [chromium-browse]

or

# ps aux |grep "defunct"

or

# ps aux | awk '{ print $8 " " $2 }' | grep -w Z

How to count all Zombie processes

# ps aux | awk {'print $8'}|grep -c Z
8

# ps aux | awk {'print $8'}|grep Z|wc -l
8

# ps aux | awk '{ print $8 " " $2 }' | grep -wc Z
8

How to kill Zombie processes

kill -9  <PID>