Also, if you kill the parent process, wouldn't init just take ownership of the zombie process? <div>On 4/16/07, Peter Garrett <<a href="mailto:peter.garrett@optusnet.com.au">peter.garrett@optusnet.com.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 20:36 +0800, Christopher Lees wrote: > If you see a zombie program listed in top, and it's using resources, > you > can kill it by typing the following: > > k > The PID number of the zombie (the first column) > 9 > No, you can't actually :) You *cannot kill a zombie process* If its parent process is still alive, you can kill that - but by definition, even a SIGKILL ( kill -9 ) will not kill a zombie -- ubuntu-au mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com"> ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au</a> </blockquote></div>