how to kill a process that is "defunct"?

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Sun, 2010-11-21 at 16:11 -0500, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com>
> wrote:
>         reaped by its parent. Zombies do not take up any resources
>         except a
>         process slot in the process table. 
> 
> 
> Are you sure about this? I see zombies that the system at least thinks
> are using resources, eg:
> 
> 
>  #  ps aux|grep Z
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME
> COMMAND
> root     11855       7.5       0.0       0       0 ?                Z
>      16:07   0:00       \_ [perl] <defunct>
> 
> 
> Note the 7.5% CPU. 

In the ps man page note this:

"CPU usage is currently expressed as the percentage of time spent
running during the entire lifetime of a process. This is not ideal, and
it does not conform to the standards that ps otherwise conforms to. CPU
usage is unlikely to add up to exactly 100%."

Looks like the %CPU means the process spent 7.% of its time using CPU
resources during its lifetime.

-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
voice: +1 480 922-7313
cell: +1 602 421-9005
smoot at tic.com