This whole exchange had me in stitches

[text] ballbase 72 points 1 d2y 20 What does sacrifice child mean in this context permalink source embed save saveRES report giveaward reply hide child comments Sehnickatavick 234 points day 2g0 Idont 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. Its the only place where kiling orphans or zombie children are normal terms permalink source embed save saveRES parent report giveaward reply hide child comments TechCubeTetrabyte Gl 61 points 1 day 250 Zombie children Like unaccounted for by the 0S permalink source embed save saveRES parent report giveaward reply hide child comments schnickatavick 128 points 1 day 200 Its a child process that finished its task and closed but the parent process hasnt acknowledged it yet. It leaves it in this awkward state where its terminated dead but it stil has to hang around in memory iie a zombie until the parent process can receive the childs return values which lets 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 giveaward reply hide child comments TerrorBite 55 points 1 day ago The child itself has already died or been kiled at that point what isnt released yet is the childs 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 cant kill a zombie process because its already dead. The only way to get rid of it is to kill the lazy parent the zombie will then be reparented to init which will clean it up immediately. permalink source embed unsave parent report giveaward reply hide child comments 4 Schnickatavick 69 poi ay 20 The only way to get rid of it is to kill the lazy parent The child itself has already died or been kiled the zombie will then be reparented See Whats with this phrasing But yeah thats exactly right permalink source embed unsave parent report giveaward reply hide child comments