How to kill a zombie process on a mac

Hack Saw says:

Sadly, it appears that killing of zombies is all about killing the parent, and if the parent is /sbin/launchd, you can kill it only with rebooting.

It would be a Very Bad Idea to kill launchd, but you can tell it to HUP.

Try sudo kill -s HUP 1

That will cause launchd to reinitialize without restarting. This has worked for me in the past (wrt. removing zombie entries).

Sadly, it appears that killing of zombies is all about killing the parent, and if the parent is /sbin/launchd, you can kill it only with rebooting.

I'm getting zombies from using Xcode, and stopping the simulator, and it's handing the zombies to my own personal /sbin/launchd, which didn't go away when I logged out.

ps -xo pid,ppid,stat,command will show you your processes, with their parent ID in the second column.