Linux 101: What are zombie processes?


When you think of zombies, your mind probably travels a rather Romero-ian path. Shambling ghouls who want nothing more than to crack open your skull and dine on your thought-meat.
But within the realm of Linux, zombies are a different creature altogether. Sort of.
On the Linux platform, a zombie is a remaining bit of a dead process that wasn't or hasn't been properly cleaned up. A zombie is created by programs that crash or weren't adequately coded to handle the cleanup of a crash or exit.
Technically speaking, when a process dies, the process descriptor remains in memory and becomes labeled EXIT_ZOMBIE. At this point, the parent process is notified that the child process has died with the SIGCHLD signal and the parent is supposed to execute the wait system call, which allows the parent to collect information from the now-dead process. This generally happens almost immediately. But not always.
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