Killing a zombie process?

[Paul Goyette <paul%vps1.whooppee.com@localhost>]

I'm not sure how I got to this point (but see high-level steps below). 
I have this zombie process:

root    27237  0.0  0.0       0      0 pts/2- Z          - 0:00.00 (sh)

Various web resources say "kill the parent" and the zombie child will 
die, too.  But that's probably not a good idea here, since the parent is 
(or at least, appears to be) init (pid==1).

I checked for other potential parents (ie, any process with pts/2 for 
its TTY), and found two shell processes (one was my "login" shell on 
that terminal, and the other was the result of a "su" command).  I 
logged out of both processes, but the zombie remained.

This is the second time this has happened, and both times were when I 
was using pkgsrc's mksandbox to rebuild something.  The sandbox is 
"almost" standard, created with this command:

	# mksandbox	--src=/build/netbsd-local/src	\
			--xsrc=/build/netbsd-local/xsrc	\
			--rwdirs=/tmp			\
		/sandbox

(I added the rwdirs=/tmp so that /sandbox/tmp would be a memory-based 
tmpfs filesystem.)

I wouldn't usually worry too much about the zombie, but it's running 
/bin/sh _from_within_the_sandbox_ and therefore its image/text file owns 
a reference to /sandbox/bin/sh and this reference prevents me from 
properly unmounting the sandbox.

I suppose I could just manually run "umount -f" but I just hate forcing 
an unmount of an in-use file-system.  :)

Suggestions?


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