How do I kill a zombie process?

Zombies will be cleaned up if their parents die. So a zombie can be removed by killing the parent process of the zombie. A parent process can be found with ps -fauwx and so kill the parent of the zombie process (often a SIGHUP is all that is needed).

In theory, the only processes that this will never be able to be applied to is the stuff like init and other stuff started by the kernel that you have no power over.

If it is a process that seems to have no parent, kill -s SIGHUP 1 (sending a hangup to init) will probably clean up a zombie.

Otherwise just kill the parent of the zombie process and all should be fine again.

-- Contributed by sjh.