Zombie process and importance of SIGCHLD signal

What is a zombie process?

When a process finishes execution, it will have an exit status to report to its parent process. Because of this last little bit of information, the process will remain in the operating system’s process table as a zombie process, indicating that it is not to be scheduled for further execution, but that it cannot be completely removed (and its process ID cannot be reused) until it has been determined that the exit status is no longer needed.

When a child exits, the parent process will receive a SIGCHLD signal to indicate that one of its children has finished executing; the parent process will typically call the wait() system call at this point. That call will provide the parent with the child’s exit status, and will cause the child to be reaped, or removed from the process table.

How do I see if there are zombie processes on a system?

Run “ps aux” and look for a Z in the STAT column.

How do I remove zombie processes from a system?

Well, first you can wait. It’s possible that the parent process is intentionally leaving the process in a zombie state to ensure that future children that it may create will not receive the same pid. Or perhaps the parent is occupied, and will reap the child process momentarily.

Secondly, you can send a SIGCHLD signal to the parent (“kill -s SIGCHLD <ppid>“). This will cause well-behaving parents to reap their zombie children.

Finally, you can kill the parent process of the zombie. At that point, all of the parent’s children will be adopted by the init process (pid 1), which periodically runs wait() to reap any zombie children.

How to prevent Zombie process

• Register the SIGCHLD handler

• Explicitly set the SIGCHLD handler to SIG_IGN

Reference

https://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/what-is-a-zombie-process/

http://www.microhowto.info/howto/reap_zombie_processes_using_a_sigchld_handler.html