Zombie processes are processes that are no longer in use by their parent, yet the parent hasn’t properly killed the process yet. Zombie processes aren’t necessarily bad, but a high number of them can be. Don’t feel that you must automatically kill all zombie processes because they’ll just come back. Just kill them after many (maybe > 50) have accumulated.
These should work with pretty much any OS. I’ve tested these in Ubuntu and CentOS
Checking for Zombies
ps -A -ostat,ppid,pid,cmd | grep -e '^[Zz]'
Automatically kill all zombie processes
sudo kill -HUP `ps -A -ostat,ppid,pid,cmd | grep -e '^[Zz]' | awk '{print $2}'`
