how can I kill a zombie process?

[CptCaterpillar23]

Does anyone know how to kill a zombie processes without rebooting? Have to tried to kill the parent process but nothing happens, and now I can not get the tape out of the drive!! User ctrl' c'd his session.
Any ideas?!
Thanks

 

[Morsing]

You can't.

If they're not cleaned up automatically, you have to reboot.

Cheers Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[AIXSPadmin]

There are 2 types of zombie processes; those owned by init and those that have a ppid other than 1. Those that are not owned by init can be successfully killed, however, what you are probably seeing are those owned by init and thus are in a wait status and not able to be removed.

One thing you may want to try is to get the pgid of the process and do a:

kill -6 -PGID

That is above do a kill -6 on the negative pgid. This sometimes will work.