This whole exchange had me in stitches

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- ballbase 72 points 1 day ago What does sacrifice child mean in this context? permalink source embed save save-RES report give award reply hide child comments -J Schnickatavick 234 points 1 day ago (last edited 1 day ago) I don't know the term "sacrifice", but generally killing a child means that a parent process needs to terminate a secondary (child) process that it started. I would assume based on context that a sacrifice is just ending a child process to save memory? Regardless, threading has some of the most messed up terminology for seemingly no reason. It's the only place where "killing orphans" or "zombie children" are normal terms permalink source embed save save-Res parent report give award reply hide child comments - TechCubeTetrabyte us 61 points 1 day ago Zombie children? Like, unaccounted for by the OS? permalink source embed save save-RES parent report give award reply hide child comments - Schnickatavick 128 points 1 day ago - It's a child process that finished its task and closed, but the parent process hasn't acknowledged it yet. It leaves it in this awkward state where it's terminated (dead) but it still has to hang around in memory (like a zombie) until the parent process can receive the child's "return" values, which let's the OS wipe it from memory, which is called reaping. Which is another messed up term, the OS is literally a "reaper" for dead processes? Who named this stuff? permalink source embed save saveRES parent report give award reply hide child comments - TerrorBite 55 points 1 day ago - The child itself has already died or been killed at that point; what isn't released yet is the child's entry in the PID table, as the return code (which the parent needs to read) needs to be stored somewhere. So the only thing the zombie process is taking up at that point, is a PID number and a few kB at most of metadata in the kernel. You can't kill a zombie process, because it's already dead. The only way to get rid of it is to kill the lazy parent; the zombie will then be re-parented to init, which will clean it up immediately. Dermalink source embed unsave parent report give award reply hide child comments - Schnickatavick 69 points 1 day ago The only way to get rid of it is to kill the lazy parent The child itself has already died or been killed the zombie will then be re-parented See! What's with this phrasing?! But yeah, that's exactly right Dermalink source embed unsave parent report oive award rediv nice child comments