Creating a zombie process
To fully understand processes in Linux, we also need to look at what a zombie process is. And to fully understand what this is, we need to create one ourselves.
A zombie process is a child that has exited before the parent, and the parent process hasn't waited for the child's status. The name "zombie process" comes from the fact that the process is undead. The process has exited, but there is still an entry for it in the system process table.
Knowing what a zombie process is and how it's created will help you avoid writing bad programs that create zombie processes on the system.
Getting ready
For this recipe, you'll only need what's listed in the Technical requirements section of this chapter.
How to do it…
In this recipe, we will write a small program that creates a zombie process on the system. We will also view the zombie process using the ps command. To prove that we can avoid zombies by waiting...
