A zombie process occurs when a child process has terminated but is still visible in the process table. Normally, when a process terminates, the parent process will receive a signal and remove the child process from the process table. However, if the parent process has terminated before the child process, the child process will become a zombie process. Zombie processes can consume system resources and can make it difficult to track down the source of problems.
There are a few ways to check for zombie processes. One way is to use the ‘ps’ command. The ‘ps’ command will list all of the processes that are currently running on the system. If you see any processes that have a ‘Z’ in the ‘STAT’ column, then those processes are zombie processes.
