title: Killing a defunct process on UNIX system
body: <p>I have a defunct process on my system:</p>
  
  <pre><code>abc      22093 19508  0 23:29 pts/4    00:00:00 grep ProcA
  abc      31756     1  0 Dec08 ?        00:00:00 [ProcA_my_collect] &lt;defunct&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I kill the above process, without a reboot of the machine? I have tried with</p>
  
  <pre><code>kill -9 31756
  sudo kill -9 31756
  </code></pre>