Kill all Zombie processes if they accept it!

kill -9 `ps xawo state=,pid=|sed -n 's/Z //p'`

just a leaner, smaller version. Love the original idea!

By: AskApache

2010-10-27 07:38:07

kill sed csh kill process FreeBSD zombie

4 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Kill all Zombie processes (Guaranteed!)

It identifies the parents of the Zombie processes and kill them. So the new parent of orphan Zombies will be the Init process and he is already waiting for reaping them. Be careful! It may also kill your useful processes just because they are not taking care and waiting for their children (bad parents!). Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
No output. But if you want to see the PIDs of your Zombies' parents just use this piece:
ps -xaw -o state -o ppid | grep Z | grep -v PID | awk '{print $2}
```
11

kill -9 `ps -xaw -o state -o ppid | grep Z | grep -v PID | awk '{print $2}'`

khashmeshab · 2010-10-27 07:29:14 13
Kill all Zombie processes if they accept it!

Tested on FreeBSD 8.1 and CSH. The scripts works correctly but the Zombies do not die! I hope it will run and function as expected in Linux and others. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
No output. But if you want to see the PIDs of your Zombies just use this piece:
ps -xaw -o state -o pid | grep Z | grep -v PID | awk '{print $2}'
```
1

kill -9 `ps -xaw -o state -o pid | grep Z | grep -v PID | awk '{print $2}'`

khashmeshab · 2010-10-27 07:19:52 4
Kill all Zombie processes one-liner

May need to substitute 'awk' for 'gawk'.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

ps axo state,ppid | awk '!/PPID/$1~"Z"{print $2}' | xargs -r kill -9

epixoip · 2017-12-07 00:47:12 23
Kill all Zombie processes one-liner

Did some research and found the previous command wrong, we don't kill a zombie but its parent. Just made some modifcation to khashmeshab's command.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

ps -xaw -o state,ppid | grep Z | grep -v PID | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs kill -9

terrywang · 2013-01-09 04:21:54 10

What Others Think

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pugpuppies95 · 63 weeks and 5 days ago

yeneba6574 · 18 weeks and 3 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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