How to kill zombie process

Question

I launched my program in the foreground (a daemon program), and then I killed it with kill -9, but I get a zombie remaining and I m not able to kill it with

Answer 1

Found it at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/suse-novell-60/howto-kill-defunct-processes-574612/

2) Here a great tip from another user (Thxs Bill Dandreta): Sometimes

kill -9 

will not kill a process. Run

ps -xal

the 4th field is the parent process, kill all of a zombie's parents and the zombie dies!

Example

4 0 18581 31706 17 0 2664 1236 wait S ? 0:00 sh -c /usr/bin/gcc -fomit-frame-pointer -O -mfpmat
4 0 18582 18581 17 0 2064 828 wait S ? 0:00 /usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.3.6/gcc -fomit-fr
4 0 18583 18582 21 0 6684 3100 - R ? 0:00 /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.6/cc1 -quie

18581, 18582, 18583 are zombies -

kill -9 18581 18582 18583

has no effect.

kill -9 31706

removes the zombies.