I stumbled upon this recently to free up resource in my cluster. here is the command to delete them all.

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces | grep Terminating | while read line; do 
pod_name=$(echo $line | awk '{print $2}' ) name_space=$(echo $line | awk 
'{print $1}' ); kubectl delete pods $pod_name -n $name_space --grace-period=0 --force; 
done

hope this help someone who read this

Force delete the pod:

kubectl delete pod --grace-period=0 --force --namespace <NAMESPACE> <PODNAME>

The --force flag is mandatory.

Delete the finalizers block from resource (pod,deployment,ds etc...) yaml:

"finalizers": [
  "foregroundDeletion"
]

Practical answer -- you can always delete a terminating pod by running:

kubectl delete pod NAME --grace-period=0

Historical answer -- There was an issue in version 1.1 where sometimes pods get stranded in the Terminating state if their nodes are uncleanly removed from the cluster.

I found this command more straightforward:

for p in $(kubectl get pods | grep Terminating | awk '{print $1}'); do kubectl delete pod $p --grace-period=0 --force;done

It will delete all pods in Terminating status in default namespace.

In my case the --force option didn't quite work. I could still see the pod ! It was stuck in Terminating/Unknown mode. So after running

kubectl delete pods <pod> -n redis --grace-period=0 --force

I ran

kubectl patch pod <pod> -p '{"metadata":{"finalizers":null}}'

If --grace-period=0 is not working then you can do:

kubectl delete pods <pod> --grace-period=0 --force

The original question is "What could be the reason for this issue?" and the answer is discussed at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/51835 & https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/65569 & see https://www.bountysource.com/issues/33241128-unable-to-remove-a-stopped-container-device-or-resource-busy

Its caused by docker mount leaking into some other namespace.

You can logon to pod host to investigate.

minikube ssh
docker container ps | grep <id>
docker container stop <id> 

I stumbled upon this recently when removing rook ceph namespace - it got stuck in Terminating state.

The only thing that helped was removing kubernetes finalizer by directly calling k8s api with curl as suggested here.

• kubectl get namespace rook-ceph -o json > tmp.json
• delete kubernetes finalizer in tmp.json (leave empty array "finalizers": [])
• run kubectl proxy in another terminal for auth purposes and run following curl request to returned port
• curl -k -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X PUT --data-binary @tmp.json 127.0.0.1:8001/k8s/clusters/c-mzplp/api/v1/namespaces/rook-ceph/finalize
• namespace is gone

Detailed rook ceph teardown here.