title: Force the parent to reap a child process <defunct>
body: <p>I've been trying desperately to kill a child process from the parent.</p>
  
  <p>I've tried:
  1.    kill -15 pid</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>kill -shotgun pid</p></li>
  <li><p>kill -9 pid</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>They all resolved in having the child process written as :
  "defunct" (zombie) when ps -A in linux.</p>
  
  <p>How do I kill the process and force it to be cleaned from the process table. I must have it cleaned because its lack of a record in the process table is how I verify in my code that the process is dead.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks :-)</p>