killing zombies

[W. H. Pollock x4575 3S235]

I missed the original article for this discussion, but I thought I'd give
my two cents worth anyway.

The reason you can't kill a zombie process is because IT IS ALREADY DEAD!!  A
zombie process ONLY takes up a slot in the proc table (and not even a full
entry!) and no other storage (on SVR2 anyway, if my memory serves).  The only
reason for zombies is that there is no other way for a child process to
return an exit status to the parent.

If the zombie is an orphan (i.e., its parent process id is 1), you
can always clean it up by signaling init (via kill) with SIGCLD (which
wakes up init which then cleans up all orphaned zombies).  This has worked
for me on SRV2 (I think, it was a while ago).

Wayne Pollock