username 11894 0.0 0.0 0 0 Z 14.37 0:00 [ad.cgi <defunct>]


I tried both "kill 11894" and "kill -9 11894", but I couldn't get rid of this process. Any clue?

It is not running or sleeping, but "Z".
What is "Z"?

Zombie. Its parent hasn't wait(1)ed for it yet.

If you kill its parent, it will go away.

I used this command line:

ps aux | grep username

It outputs two lines:

username 11894 0.0 0.0 0 0 Z 14.37 0:00 [ad.cgi <defunct>]

The second output is the process of ps aux | grep username.

How do I search for the parent and kill it?

ps aux -H

shows you the process hierarchy. Find the pid and you should
be able to see the parent process above the child process.

Thank you, cperciva and erik =)

I've found that some processes don't respond to skill. You may also want to try the following:

skill -KILL -p 12345

where 12345 is a PID. Consult the manpage for skiill specific to your operating system. I'm running RH 7.