how to kill a zombie process?

Question

I got a two processes during the network drive failure.

1 D     0  1199     1  0  80   0 - 19101 wait_o pts/21   00:00:01 rsync
1 Z     0  1226  1199  0  80   0 -     0 exit   pts/21   00:00:00 rsync <defunct>

How to kill them?

thanks Arman

Answer 1

Send a SIGCHILD signal to the parent process and if that doesn't work kill the parent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process