Oh lonely code thy process all forlorn
Loops but to toil in thankless servitude
Unpraised for wit but savaged with ill scorn
At each found bug or flaw that thou exude
Yet if thou fork and then do spawn a child
A mother's mirror born of innocence
To share life's load, transactions reconciled
In mutex'd memory twixt each paired instance
Thy yield increased would empty buffers make
To give thee pause to take a cycled breath
And running on anon until a break
Or Control-C brings unto thee a death
An orphaned child thy memory would keep
Or die, or zombify in restless sleep
The parent-child process lifecycle in the C programming language on the Unix operating system.
A parent process "forks" to spawn a child process. The child process is an (almost) exact copy of the parent. If the parent dies, the child process becomes an orphan. Sometimes when a process dies, it is not cleaned up correctly, and becomes a zombie process. (Who thought software engineers have no sense of humour?)