How to kill a <defunct> process
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Last update
2020-06-18
2020
06-18
«how to kill zombie processes»

<defunct> means that the process has either completed its task or has been corrupted or killed, but its child processes are still running or these parent process is monitoring its child process.

In order to termiante this kind of process you have to kill its parent process:

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# kill all parent PIDs of <defunct> processes
ps -ef | grep [d]efunct | cut -b8-20 | xargs kill -9

Source: stackoverflow