Orphan processes are an opposite situation to zombie processes, referring to the case in which a parent process terminates before its child processes, which are said to become "orphaned". Unlike the asynchronous child-to-parent notification that happens when a child process terminates (via the signal), child processes are not notified immediately when their parent finishes. Instead, the system simply redefines the "parent PID" field in the child process's data to be the process that is the "ancestor" of every other process in the system, whose PID generally has the value of 1 (one), and whose name is traditionally "init". Thus, it was said that init "adopts" every orphan process on the system.