Killing a defunct process

A defunct (or "zombie") process is a process that isn't running, isn't eligible to run, and takes up no system resources. It's actually a process that has exited, but its parent has not called wait() in order to find out its exit status.

defunct processes can't be killed since they are already dead. To make them disappear you have to kill their parent process.

Find the parent process id of the defunct process and then kill that parent process:

ps -fe | grep defunctprocess | awk '{print $3}'

kill -9 parentprocessid