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As the question implies, what is a zombie task/process in top?

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Zombies - what are they? –  sds Jun 22 at 21:22

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A zombie process is usually the result of a shell (graphical or command line) that either neglects to reap its children or simply doesn't do it very often (I wrote a WM once - it had at least a dozen mrxvt processes wandering around). –  new123456 Jun 16 '11 at 15:15

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