zombie process can't be killed

Question

Is there a way to kill a zombie process? I\'ve tried calling exit to kill the process and even sending SIGINT signal to the process, but it seems t

Answer 1

A zombie process is a process id (and associated termination status and resource usage information) that has not yet been waited for by its parent process. The only ways to eliminate it are to get its parent to wait for it (sometimes this can be achieved by sending SIGCHLD to the parent manually if the parent was just buggy and had a race condition where it missed the chance to wait) but usually you're out of luck unless you forcibly terminate the parent.

Edit: Another way, if you're desperate and don't want to kill the parent, is to attach to the parent with gdb and forcibly call waitpid on the zombie child.