what are zombies

[aesop]

You hit on what a zombie is - an entry in the process table.  Basically, 
a process terminated and the parent process did not wait around.  In a 
sense, a child process becomes a zombie when the parent will not 
acknowledge the child's death ;-).  The resources (i.e. memory) have 
already been deallocated, and the child sends a signal (SIGCHILD ??) to 
the parent.  When the parent responds with a signal (not sure which one), 
the entry is removed from the process table. 

I'm sure someone else can provide a more technical explanation :-)

The greatest harm from zombies is that they can potentially fill up your 
process table.  I do not know if there are any techniques in removing 
zombies other than rebooting.  As you found out, kill -9 doesn't.  I'd 
like to know if anyone knows other methods.

Hope this helps...

 On Mon, 19 Feb 1996, David Hamm wrote:

> I had a strange thing happen Saturday.  I tried to get in to my Linux box from home using ppp and it wouldn't answer, which in itself is unusual, once I got to the console I did a ps -x and noticed that several of the daemons were marked as  zombie.  I looked through the man pages and found nothing that clearly described what zombies are. Then I tried to kill -9 them but they would not unload from memory.  Any information would be helpful.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> David
> 

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