topic WTH is process 'touch' and hwy is it showing zombie? in General Topics

WTH is process 'touch' and hwy is it showing zombie?

bmcn678 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:24:47 GMT

Running show system resources, I see multiple instances of a process called 'touch' showing in a zombie state.
I haven't been able to find anything about this process or what it does.
Does anyone have any information on this?

bmax@fw-ab-a(active)> show system resources

top - 10:19:01 up 289 days, 14:35, 1 user, load average: 1.08, 0.84, 0.78
Tasks: 265 total, 1 running, 259 sleeping, 0 stopped, 5 zombie
%Cpu(s): 2.3 us, 3.8 sy, 0.0 ni, 93.2 id, 0.0 wa, 0.8 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 15709.9 total, 132.7 free, 7899.8 used, 7677.4 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 7.8 total, 0.0 free, 7.8 used. 8495.8 avail Mem

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

14045 20 0 0 0 0 Z 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 sh
14072 20 0 39436 5964 4608 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 sh
14074 20 0 43060 4920 3752 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 sed
14087 20 0 0 0 0 Z 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 touch
14089 20 0 0 0 0 Z 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 touch
14091 20 0 0 0 0 Z 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 touch
14092 20 0 0 0 0 Z 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 touch

Re: WTH is process 'touch' and hwy is it showing zombie?

JayGolf — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:04:12 GMT

Hi @bmcn678 ,

Interesting question!

Touch itself is a standard Linux utility that either 1. Creates a file or 2. updates a file's timestamp. I can’t say exactly which specific script invoked it here, but the the Linux foundation of PAN-OS implies the presence of various OS-level processes and resource management activities.

So when we look at show system resources we essentially see a bunch of Linux OS-level processes that support all the things the fw is doing in the background. Id imagine touch is highly involved with log handling, state tracking, etc.

You may also notice some of these entries showing up briefly in a zombie state. That just means the process already finished and is waiting for its parent to clean it up... it’s not running and isn’t consuming resources. Seeing a small number like this is normal. **I have a lab pa-vm and i currently have 3 zombies.