Killing a zombie process in Solaris

Friday, August 11th, 2017

Yes we do have a couple Solaris servers around and I had a case of a zombie preventing a user from accessing it. How do I kill those again?

A zombie is the slang identifier for what is called a defunct process. The child processes are gone but the image remains.

How to find them:

ps -ef | grep -i defunt

The preap command is needed to kill it.  Find the one that is causing your problem and enter:

preap 11111

It should give you a message with status code 0 to show it worked. You can also verify by entering:

ps -ef | grep 11111

The only thing that should be seen is the grep command.

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