On Linux (and all Unix-like) operating systems, when a process exits, all the resources associated with that process are released with the exception of its entry in the process table. This entry in the process table is kept until the parent process reads the entry to learn about the exit status of its child. This transient state of a process is called a zombie. As soon as the parent process reads the entry, the zombie process is removed from the process table, and this is called reaping. If the parent process exits before the child process, the init process (PID 1) adopts the child process (PID 1) and it eventually reaps adopted child processes when they exit:
In the preceding screenshot, we snipped the process tree for Ubuntu 14.04 on the left-hand side and Ubuntu 18.04 on the right-hand side. As we can see, both process trees have the init...
