Is there any way to kill a zombie process without reboot?
I don't thing zombie process is much of a headache. A zombie process does not take up any resources. It is just that it has it's entry in the process table.
A Zombie process is not an orphan process, it does have a parent.
kill
, skill
pkill
will not work since the process is already killed, just that it's entry has not been removed.
Zombie process can be killed by sending SIGCHLD
signal to parent.
I think the signal number of SIGCHLD
is 17
or 18
If this also fails, then you might want to kill the parent itself.
From Wikipedia on SIGCHLD signal:
When a child process terminates before the parent has called wait, the kernel retains some information about the process to enable its parent to call wait later. Because the child is still consuming system resources but not executing it is known as a zombie process.
EDIT 1: The system resources consumed is mostly the process table entry. If anyone knows if it consumes more than that - memory or CPU cycle, then please add an explanation. AFAIK it hardly takes up any significant system resources.
EDIT 2: Quoting from Wikipedia
On Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table. This entry is still needed to allow the process that started the (now zombie) process to read its exit status.
So the entry is kept so that the parent process can know the exit status because the moment the child exits, the parent is probably not in a state or not ready to read it's exit status.
EDIT 3
Till date I never experienced a zombie process taking 100% of the CPU. Seeing this for the first time.
Try doing a killall utorrent.exe
I can see that there are two instances of utorrent.exe
and one of them is zombie. Probably the second one (child). killall should kill the parent since the child(zombie) cannot be killed.
EDIT 4
Looks like the killall did not work since it was giving TERM signal instead of KILL.
Try out killall --signal=KILL utorrent.exe
If this does not work then try killing the process selectivly.
Get the list of utorrent.exe process PID
ps -e | grep -i utorrent
You should get two process like
xxxx ? aa:bb:cc utorrent.exe defunct
yyyy ? aa:bb:cc utorrent.exe
So the second one is the parent. Kill it using
kill -9 yyyy
EDIT 5
Please try finding the process's Parent Id by this bash command
cat /proc/{defunctpid}/status | grep -i ppid
in your case is
cat /proc/7298/status | grep -i ppid
If the output comes like
PPid: 1
Then sadly I think you are out of luck. Process Id 1
belongs to init without which your system cannot run
Using kill
on the process itself is indeed ineffective, as the process is already dead; kill
brings a live process to zombie state.
The parent process is responsible for picking up the exit code of the process; the process remains a zombie until this is done. The init
process will pick up the exit code of any process and throw it away, so it is the "last-resort" parent that will clean up any zombie that is a direct descendant.
Killing the parent of the zombie process is usually effective because the zombie process then reverts to init
as its parent as soon as the parent process is gone (i.e. killing the parent has turned that process into a zombie, and the grandparent has read the parent's exit code, so the parent is truly gone). A zombie can be parent to a zombie, so merely killing the parent is not sufficient, it also needs to be collected by another process itself.
Note that processes are never responsible for cleaning up their grandchildren -- they always revert to process 1 as parent (which is why daemon authors sometimes use a double fork() and terminate the process in the middle to fully disassociate the child process from the invoking shell)
The reason why killing wine
probably isn't effective is because it wasn't really the parent of the zombie process; rather, the "utorrent.exe" that is a direct descendant of init is. This process however is still running normally, just neglecting its duties.