Oracle Database Discussions

Hello,

I have been a DBA for about a year now, so as you can say just got started. Today i had a interview. And the person asked how would i find a dead process. and my answer was...lets says its a pmon process...i would do ps-ef|grep pmon to find if the process is running or if its dead. And then they asked what about zombie process or something like that to find it( i said not sure about it)....after the interview i went online and try reading on zombie process for unix....but i wanted to know how can we relate that to our background process of oracle...or else we can do something like below to find if all oracle process are up or not...i understand below is one way to find out all the process owned by oracle ..... so how do i find out dead process relating to zombie process for oracle...and really sorry if its a confusing Q....

ps -ef|grep "ora_"|grep -v grep|grep $ORACLE_SID|awk '{print $2}'