Archive for the tag 'zombie'

SBDavid
Jan 20th, 2013

Finding zombie processes

Finding zombie processes

If you have a server which is not working very well, it is possible that the process that you want to use is in a zombie state. You can see that there is a zombie process with top for example.

But with top you can’t not always see which process it is.

If we use the following command we can see which process are zombies.

ps -el | grep ‘Z’

With a normal ps -el command you see an output with in the second column the state of the process.

Here are some states:

S : sleeping
R : running
D : waiting
Z : zombie (defunct)