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You Can’t Kill Zombie Processes - Here's Why (defunct processes) by You Suck at Programming [14:32 mins] on Apr 22, 2026 (youtu.be)

submitted 4 days ago by thingsiplay@lemmy.ml to c/linux@programming.dev

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Video: https://youtu.be/6VH_aDNF6JU

Source Code → github.com/bahamas10/ysap/tree/main/code/2026-04-22-zombie-process

Explanation of what a zombie process in Linux is, how to create one and what happens if there is one.

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[–] peterhorvath@mastodon.de 2 points 4 days ago (4 children)

@thingsiplay Stop their parent process and the zombie will go under init, then init will stop them.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That's what the video explains as well. Killing the parents will make init adopt and kill the children in the process. Problem is, that you might not want to stop / kill the parent process, depending on what you are doing. One should be very careful of doing so.

[–] peterhorvath@mastodon.de 1 points 4 days ago

@thingsiplay Sorry you might right! In this case, I would debug the parent process and I would execute the wait() syscalls in its name, but it is hardly autimatizable and probably many people can not do that. Thanks the info!

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