No no no. Don’t use kill -9.

It doesn’t give the process a chance to cleanly:

1) shut down socket connections

2) clean up temp files

3) inform its children that it is going away

4) reset its terminal characteristics

and so on and so on and so on.

A simple work ?
kill -9 $(ps aux | awk ‘{print $2,$8}’ | grep Z | awk ‘{print $1}’)

King Regard

you’re not likely to get the mouse, but you may do extensive damage to everything around you in the process.

if I use kill -9 to erase zombies from servers what kind of problems might I cause ?
can you give me a hint
thanks

I have a command prompt open, within that command prompt I have an exe running.

When you look at the active program in the windows task manager, it shows the DOS window.
On the desktop, ther is an open DOS window, and you can see it last executed the progam (delay), but has not returned.

If you Right click on the program in task manage, and choose go to process, there is no CMD process, Further more, the program that is running within that environment, is also NOT listed.

I am remote administrating this machine, and have attempted to reboot, but it will not reboot. I have written VB scripts to shutdown and reboot all the OS processes, but still no go.

Call it a zombie, call it a ghost, call it what you will…. It is there and will not go away without a full and complete shutdown of the machine (which I will have to do). But does anybody know 1) how this happens, or 2) how to resolve without a physical warm or cold boot?

I wrote the script above because we had several developers on a group of HPUX boxes testing a complicated MPE ported application. In many situations runaway processes would create zombie children which would alert us to problematic code. This script would tell me what process created them and who the developer was who kicked it off. Very helpful to me, and I thought that someone, somewhere might benefit from it. Since it is still here and ya’ll are finding it when you search for “how to Kill Zombie processes” it looks like maybe I was right :) Maybe someone learned some basic scripting skills too ;) Isn’t that what the internet is for?

That said, you should never, ever be using ‘kill -9′, that is an absolute last-ditch resort for dealing with a system that is almost non-functional or in some other critical state. Having a few zombie processes tying up nearly no resources at all is not a critical state, and using kill -9 is like chasing a mouse with a heavy hammer; you’re not likely to get the mouse, but you may do extensive damage to everything around you in the process.

So, what to do? find out what is spawning these processes, and why it is not shutting them down when they exit. See if there is a patch that fixes the issue. Make a report to the maintainers of the package. Restart the parent process. Or to reiterate, find out the cause of the problem and fix that.

ps -eo pid,ppid,user,args,stat –sort stat | grep Z | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ | sort -u

gives you the parent process id(s)

kill -s SIGCHLD
or
kill
…

ps ax | awk ‘{ if ($NF == “&#60defunct&#62″) print $1 }’ | xargs kill -9

ps ax | awk ‘{ if ($NF == “\”) print $1 }’ | xargs kill -9

ps ax | awk ‘{ if ($NF == “”) print $1 }’ | xargs kill -9

#!/usr/bin/bash
#
# Zombie Slayer
#
# zombie_slayer [OPTIONS]
#
# -d
#   Just diplay the zombie processes and exit
#
# -h | help
#   Display help
#
# Default is to show processes and the ask what to kill
#
function Z_Display
{
    echo ""
    echo "PID - PPID - State - User - Proc"
    UNIX95= ps -eo pid,ppid,state,user,comm | awk 'BEGIN { count=0 } $3 ~ /Z/ { count++; print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5 } END { print "\n" count " Zombie(s) to slay." }'
    echo ""
}
function Z_Kill
{
    read -p "Enter PPID to kill or 'exit' : " SLAY_PPID
    if [ "$SLAY_PPID" = "exit" ] || [ "$SLAY_PPID" = "" ]
    then
        exit
    fi
    ps -p $SLAY_PPID | grep -q $SLAY_PPID
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]
    then
        UNIX95= ps -o pid,user,state,comm -p $SLAY_PPID | \
        awk '$1 ~ /^[0-9]*$/ { print "The program " $4 " with PID " $1 " is being run by the user " $2 " and is currently in state " $3 }'
        read -p "Are you sure you want to kill PID $SLAY_PPID ? Y|N : " COMMIT_KILL
        if [ "$COMMIT_KILL" = "Y" ] || [ "$COMMIT_KILL" = "y" ]
        then
            kill -9 $SLAY_PPID
            echo ""
            read -p "Killed PID $SLAY_PPID. Run again? Y/N : " GO_AGAIN
        else
            Z_Kill
        fi
    else
        echo "Invalid PID. Try again."
        echo ""
        Z_Kill
    fi
}
function help
{
    echo "Usage: zombie_slayer [-h | help -d]"
    echo "-d just display zombie processes and exit"
    echo "-h | help : This help"
    exit
}
if [ "$1" = "-h" ] || [ "$1" = "help" ]
then
    help
fi
if [ "$1" = "-d" ]
then
    Z_Display
else
    Z_Display
    Z_Kill
fi
if [ "$GO_AGAIN" = "Y" ] || [ "$GO_AGAIN" = "y" ]
then
    Z_Display
    Z_Kill
fi
echo ""

for each in `ps -ef | grep ” | grep -v PID | awk ‘{ print $3 }’`; do for every in `ps -ef | grep $each | grep -v cron | awk ‘{ print $2 }’`; do kill -9 $every; done; done