Answer by kenorb for How to find zombie process?

To list process zombies, try this command:

ps j | awk '$7 ~ "Z"'

^{You may need to change $7 depending on your operating system.}

This also will return the list of their parent process ids (PPID).

To try to kill the zombies (after testing the above command), try:

kill -9 $(ps j | awk 'NR>1 && $7 ~ "Z" {print $2}')

To identify their parents, try with pstree, like:

$ ps j | awk 'NR>1 && $7 ~ "T" {print $2}' | xargs -L1 pstree -sgsystemd(1)───sshd(1036)───sshd(2325)───sshd(2325)───bash(2383)───zombie(2430)systemd(1)───sshd(1036)───sshd(2325)───sshd(2325)───bash(2383)───zombie(2431)systemd(1)───sshd(1036)───sshd(2325)───sshd(2325)───bash(2383)───zombie(2432)