What are the potential risks associated with zombie processes in the operating system?

Zombie processes are processes that have completed execution, but their parent process has not yet read their exit status via wait(), so they remain in the process table.

Potential risks:

• Accumulation of zombie processes can lead to exhaustion of process table resources, preventing new processes from being created.
• This can cause system instability or slow down.

To avoid problems, it is important to properly handle the termination of child processes, for example, by using SIGCHLD signal handlers or periodically calling wait().