 Under normal operation it will typically be immediately waited on by its parent, and then reaped by the system, reclaiming the resource (the process table entry).If a child is not waited on by its parent, it continues to consume this resource indefinitely, and thus is a resource leak.Such situations are typically handled with a special "reaper" process that locates zombies and retrieves their exit status, allowing the operating system to then deallocate their resources.