William Morder via tde-users wrote:
It seems to me that the mysterious w is not any one process, but rather a kind of process that has become a zombie. Otherwise, there could not be, as sometimes happens, half a dozen processes named w.
you find a zombie with ps auxwww | grep 'Z' and it is usually <defunct>
A process in Linux can have one of the following states:
D = uninterruptible sleep I = idle R = running S = sleeping T = stopped by job control signal t = stopped by debugger during trace Z = zombie
look here https://itsfoss.com/kill-zombie-process-linux/
$ ps auxwww | grep 'Z' USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND emanoil 719868 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 20:22 0:00 [firefox-bin] <defunct> emanoil 732279 0.0 0.0 6332 2192 pts/3 S+ 22:49 0:00 grep Z