From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Jun  9 12:46:58 2010
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From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To: Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com>
References: <AANLkTinguZnvQTeA-SCiFqjGSIzejKaaf7_MPdqryN0p@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:46:20 +0300
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinguZnvQTeA-SCiFqjGSIzejKaaf7_MPdqryN0p@mail.gmail.com>
	(Eitan Adler's message of "Wed, 9 Jun 2010 14:08:58 +0300")
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Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Too many defunct processes; kill -9 not working
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On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 14:08:58 +0300, Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com> wrote:
> Lately I've been getting a considerable number of defunct processes. I
> do not know of any major event that changed my computer (ie it is not
> related to an ports update or a freeBSD upgrade).
>
> This is often caused by me killing the process using kill -15 or kill
> -3 or kill -9.
>
> What can I do to determine why processes are not getting killed by kill -9?
>
> % ps -o ppid -o comm|grep defunct|cut -d ' ' -f 1 |xargs kill -9
> typically gets rid of them (by killing their parent)

That's the only way to kill zombies...

You can't signal the zombie/defunct process itself, because it's gone
already.  But you can kill the process who spawned it.