How to kill a defunct process (most of the time)

Defunct processes are processes that have become corrupted in such a way the no long can communicate (not really the right word, more like signal each other) with their parent or child process.
So kill the parent or child and 99% of the time (around here at least) the defunct process will go away! No parent or child, you're out of luck, or look for a stuck automount.

#
# list detached non root processes on Solaris
#
clarion:/# ps -ef | grep -v \ \ root | grep -v pts/ | less
     UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY      TIME CMD
  xxxxxx   168     1  0   Jan 13 ?        0:00 /usr/lib/nfs/statd
    yyyy 28835 28789  0   Apr 07 ?        2:05 xbiff++
     zzz 13868     1  0                   0:00 <defunct>
    aaaa 24724 24721  0   Apr 02 ?        0:02 /usr/openwin/bin/xload -hl red -g
eom +396+26
    nnnn 28789 28786  0   Apr 07 ?        0:00 /pkg/local/bin/tcsh -c xbiff++

# now use /usr/proc/bin/ptree to find parent or child
## Linux users might try ps -ef --forest | less

clarion:/# /usr/proc/bin/ptree 13868
13868 <defunct>
  16596 a.out
clarion:/# kill -9 16596


# ta daa !
#
# or
#
bash# /usr/proc/bin/ptree `ps -ef | grep -v ^\ \ \ \ root | awk '/<defunct>/ {print $2}'` | less

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