Crucial Exams

CompTIA Linux+ XK0-006 (V8) Practice Question

During a post-incident review you run:

$ ps -eo pid,ppid,stat,comm | grep '\<defunct\>'

and notice dozens of entries such as:

 8123  8010 Z   httpd
 8124  8010 Z   httpd

All of them show the state letter Z and the command is marked "". The parent process (PID 8010) is still active. Which action is the most appropriate way to remove these processes from the process table without rebooting the server?

  • Use renice -n -20 on the zombie PIDs so they complete and exit more quickly.

  • Restart or otherwise signal the parent process so it calls wait() (or exits), allowing the zombies to be reaped.

  • Send kill -9 to each zombie PID to force the kernel to remove them.

  • Flush outstanding disk I/O because the Z state means the processes are stuck in uninterruptible sleep.

CompTIA Linux+ XK0-006 (V8)
Services and User Management
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