How to kill defunct processes

As per wikipedia:

A zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table, this entry being still needed to allow the process that started the zombie process to read its exit status. The term zombie process derives from the common definition of zombie—an undead person. In the term's colorful metaphor, the child process has died but has not yet been reaped.


In Solaris, you can clear defunct processes by this command:

preap pid

For example:

ps -ef |grep defunct


oemgrid 5639 14889 0 - ? 0:00
oemgrid 16251 11759 0 - ? 0:00
oemgrid 20869 13440 0 - ? 0:00
oemgrid 4874 12418 0 - ? 0:00
oemgrid 3508 11759 0 - ? 0:00
oemgrid 20713 11353 0 - ? 0:00
oemgrid 17331 11353 0 - ? 0:00
oemgrid 12250 14173 0 - ? 0:00


preap 5639

$ preap 5639
5639: exited with status 0
$ ps -ef |grep 5639 |grep -v grep