Process Posterity

• A child process,
• spawned with fork,
• terminated with exit;
• status determined with wait.
• Post-execution,
• child metadata lingers,
• remaining in the process table,
• until its status is known.
• In this state of limbo,
• the child is a zombie,
• if its parent dies,
• the child is an orphan.
• init, pid==1,
• is a foster parent;On the
• adopting orphaned processes,
• their ppid becomes 1.
• init is a reaper,
• freeing process table slots;
• calling wait periodically,
• may its zombies R.I.P.