why we're not telling "ps" what info we want to get provided? let's have a try:
read zSTAT zPPID zPID zSTAT zCMD <<< $(ps -xao stat,ppid,pid,cmd|awk '$1=="Z" {print $1" "$2" "$3" "$4}')[[ ! -z ${zPPID} ]] && echo "Zombie found! PID: "${zPID}" ("${zCMD}"), Parent to kill: "${zPPID}this way is pretty quick and works fine. but careful! The system is marking a lot of processes for short time as zombie, some ms later they are reaped and gone... so make sure to count up a variable and only react on zombies which are not reaped after the third detection in a row... then i have to kill the parent process because the cpu is heating up by running on highest frequency, consuming a lot of electrical power for a parent process that is no longer working as expected...
checking if the zombie is reaped or not can be quicker if we only check one parameter:
zombie=$(ps -xao pid|awk '$1=="'${zPID}'" {print $1}')[[ ! -z ${zombie} ]] && sudo kill -KILL ${zPPID}