this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Yes you can. You get rid of the zombies by killing the parent process.
Zombies are getting to be parents now?
Woke has gone too far, in my day they would have gotten a bullet between the eyes.
I think zombies go under kernel or "root process" by default now
they can be automatically moved to have parent 1 or something like that, so only way to kill them is a reboot. But personally I am yet to setup a stationary (uh, not a laptop) computer and see how it works for me without poweroff at the end of the day
They get moved to the init process (parent 1) if their original parent dies. The init process should always wait on its child processes so they'll get cleaned up then. No reboot needed.
Once they're zombies all they really exist for is to return an exit code for their parent - they're no longer running.
You can also try signalling the parent with a SIGCHLD. Most of the time it does nothing, and hey, you'd be using a stronger version of the kill command anyway if it doesn't work.