Sunday 29 January 2012

Ahhhhhh save us all...Its the Zombie Process !

When a parent process does not use wait() which will allow the parent to wait until its child has finished execution,or use signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN); ,the sigchld signal indicates the death or for that matter the completion of a child process and it allows the parent to know the same, the usage of the above function with sig_ign as the second argument indicates to ignore the death of the child.
However if wait or the signal functions are not used then the child even after completion will have an entry in the process table..though all its resource are deallocated ,and how cool can it get (seriously !) it can't be "killed" by a kill() command..
You can see zombies if any by using the ps command in the terminal and observing the Z at stat column.

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