How to get a listing of hanging/zombie processes ?

[Guest_imported]

Does anyone have any handy tips on how to monitor hanging/zombie processes ?
I thought about combining the "ps" command with awk, but it's not really very helpful (assumes a hanging process has a PPID of 1) :

ps -ef |awk '{if ( $3= 1) print $1," "$2," " $3," "$5, " "$8 }' .. etc

Does anyone have any better ideas ?

Thanks in advance,
axepert

 

[KenCunningham]

In my experience if you do a ps -ef | grep defunct this will usually tell you details of zombie processes, not that you can usually do anything to get rid of them other than reboot! HTH.

 

[PedroG]

To get rid of a zombie process, you can kill its parent. But if its parent is the init process... you'll have to reboot to destroy it.

 

[Guest_imported]

Thanks folks.

I was actually more concerned about runaway/hanging processes. ANyway, here's something I came up with for the on the DEC platform :

ps -eo %cpu -o state -o stime -o pid -o user -o cmd|grep `date +%b` |sort -rn|more

It checks for processes that were running earlier in the month sorted by highest CPU utilisation.