[js2]

One of these is killing "zombie" processes that have been abandoned by their calling session.

That's funny terminolgy, isn't it? Killing a process usually means sending it a signal, typically TERM or KILL, that causes it to exit. But a zombie process is one that has already exited, but hasn't been waited for by its parent, where its parent is either the process that spawned it, or if that process has died, the process with PID 1. This is usually referred to as reaping the zombie process, not killing it. AFAIK, a signal sent to a zombie process is simply ignored.

Or do the quotes around zombie imply a different meaning, such as "zombie-like"?

[ChrisArgyle]

If we're being technical the author should have wrote "reaping" not "killing". It's a very different process.

The use of quotes is probably an acknowledgement that the term "zombie" is not universal. For example Linux uses "defunct" instead.

Basically, zombie processes happen when a child process exits but the parent process--the one that spawned it--doesn't reap it. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process

[masklinn]

No, it's a zombie in the normal sense, the killing here is not sending it a signal but reaping zombie processes (in the sense of personified death reaping souls) by waiting on it.

Things would probably be clearer if the quotes were around "killing" rather than "zombie", mayhaps the interviewer/writer was unfamiliar with the terminology.

[ibotty]

I strongly doubt that! Josh knows the terminology. It was surly just an oversight.