Today after a conversation about security with a friend I ran top in the terminal while surfing in FireFox. Top showed one zombie running. I never expected to see that in Mepis or any Linux. When I switched browsers to Konqueror the zombie disappeared. I am not sure what I experienced. Can anyone tell me what happened? And is this something that happens often?

a zomebie! they are there to eat your brains, quick get a shotgun and barricade yourself in the basement! (just kidding)

zombie process are just sleeping?, waiting for you to tell the computer to do something and then they wake up and make your PC do its magic...

open a term and (man top) it is pretty long and i could not find zombie in it...

Thanks for waking me up. The only zombie I had heard of related to computers is when a spammer is able to infect hundreds even thousands of computers to spread his spam without the users of the zombied computers knowing it. Your link showed me there is another way of using the zombie term. Thank you again.

edit: If you are using top in Mepis you will see zombie at the end of the task line, the second line from the top in the header. I am dual booting Mepis with PC-BSD where top doesn't have zombie as one of the categories on the task line. I suppose most versions of top don't show zombie.

a Zombie process is nothing to worry about when it comes to Linux,..

with ms-windows a zombied PC is a different definition...

i can understand the concern...