Zombie Program?

[Peter Garrett]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:32:11 +1000
Minarwan <rodinia at gmail.com> wrote:

> But when I quit Firefox, then I started it again and visited other 
> websites, the Zombie process didn't come up. For a reason I don't know, 
> that particular forum made my computer running a Zombie process.
> 
> Anyway, I found out the way how to kill them from this website:
> http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/killing-zombie-process.html

Actually, zombies are pretty harmless :)

As I understand it, they are processes that get left behind when their
parent process dies and doesn't clean up. The reason they are hard to
"kill" is that the parent process would need to be killed - but the parent
no longer exists. So the zombie is neither running nor dead - hence
"undead" as in "zombie" ... ( this explanation is probably horribly flawed
from a technical point of view, but you get the general idea.. )

So: if a process was spawned by firefox ( a plugin, say), and becomes a
zombie, it will not disappear until firefox is restarted, or perhaps until
firefox is stopped at least .

I don't actually see how a zombie process can use resources - it isn't
doing anything :-) Experts please correct me if I am wrong...

Peter