Zombies

Processes that are dead but haven’t been removed from the Process Table are called Zombies.

If a process creates a child & the child terminates before the parent process, the child process cannot be removed from the Process Table till the parent process terminates. The child thus becomes a Zombie.

main(){
if ( fork() > 0){
printf(“Parent\n”);
sleep(50);
}
}

In the PROCESS TABLE (ps –el), Zombie process’ are represented by a Z