Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!news.stealth.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cs.utexas.edu!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news-in2.uu.net!news.artisoft.com!usenet
From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What is a zombie?
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 18:14:31 -0700
Organization: Me
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <3249D8F7.2EA39DDA@lambert.org>
References: <52a5dt$qef@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hecate.artisoft.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.01 (X11; I; Linux 1.1.76 i486)
Dannyman wrote:
]
] Newbie question here, but when I run top, what *is* a zombie?
] Should I worry? It's certainly a cute term!
It means the user on the tty has been exposed to tetrodotoxin.
8-).
Actually, it means the process has exited, but that its status
has not been reaped by its parent process. Typically, this
happens when inexperienced programmers write code that calls
fork, but doesn't call wait(2) or ignore SIGCHLD -- either of
which will cause the zombie to exit.
Look at the parent program for the problem.
Terry Lambert
terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.