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by ChrisArgyle 3759 days ago
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