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When a child process terminates before the parent has called wait, the kernel retains some information about the process, such as its exit status, to enable its parent to call wait later. [3] Because the child is still consuming system resources but not executing it is known as a zombie process .
A C program may also use the exit() function specifying the integer status or exit macro as the first parameter. The return value from main is passed to the exit function, which for values zero, EXIT_SUCCESS or EXIT_FAILURE may translate it to "an implementation defined form" of successful termination or unsuccessful termination. [citation needed]
Such an orphan process becomes a child of a special root process, which then waits for the child process to terminate. Likewise, a similar strategy is used to deal with a zombie process, which is a child process that has terminated but whose exit status is ignored by its parent process. Such a process becomes the child of a special parent ...
An operating system may provide variations of the wait call that allow a process to wait for any of its child processes to exit, or to wait for a single specific child process (identified by its process ID) to exit. Some operating systems issue a signal to the parent process when a child process terminates, notifying the parent process and ...
Parent is the process that receives the SIGCHLD signal on child's termination, whereas real parent is the thread that actually created this child process in a multithreaded environment. For a normal process, both these two values are same, but for a POSIX thread which acts as a process, these two values may be different. [2]
Then, the copy, called the "child process", calls the exec system call to overlay itself with the other program: it ceases execution of its former program in favor of the other. The fork operation creates a separate address space for the child. The child process has an exact copy of all the memory segments of the parent process.
The current process may wait for the child to terminate or may continue to execute concurrent computing. Creating a new subprocess requires enough memory in which both the child process and the current program can execute. There is a family of spawn functions in DOS, inherited by Microsoft Windows.
This occurs for the child processes, where the entry is still needed to allow the parent process to read its child's exit status: once the exit status is read via the wait system call, the zombie's entry is removed from the process table and it is said to be "reaped". A child process initially becomes a zombie, only then being removed from the ...