A system administrator is troubleshooting an application that is reported to be leaking resources. Upon running ps aux, the administrator observes several child processes of the application are marked with a 'Z' in the STAT column. Although these processes have completed their tasks, they remain in the process table. What is the state of these processes?
A process marked with a 'Z' state flag is a 'zombie' or 'defunct' process. This state indicates that the process has completed execution, but its parent process has not yet read its exit status using the wait() system call. As a result, the process entry remains in the process table until it is properly 'reaped' by its parent. The other options are incorrect process states for this scenario: 'Running' is for processes currently executing, 'Sleeping' is for processes waiting for a resource or event, and 'Stopped' is for processes that have been paused by a signal.
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What happens if a zombie process is not reaped?
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