Linux Process Management – Best Way to Kill Zombie and D State Processes

linuxprocesszombie

What is the best way to kill Zombie processes and D state process by single command.

Best Answer

Double tap.

Actually, reboot. There's no real way to easily get rid of a zombie, but there's really no reason to because a zombie isn't taking up resources on the computer; it's an orphaned entry in a process table. Init is supposed to collect it but something went wrong with the process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process

Perhaps you're asking because there's worse problem...are you getting a boatload of zombies roaming your process table? That usually means a bug in the program or a problem with a configuration. You shouldn't have a huge number of zombies on the system. One or two I don't worry. If you have fifty of them from Apache or some other daemon, you probably have a problem. But that's not directly related to your question...