[lug] Killing a process that doesn't want to die

[rm at fabula.de]

On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 01:21:11PM -0600, Warren Sanders wrote:
> Hugh Brown wrote:
> >if it has a parent task other than 1, you can try killing the parent
> >task.  otherwise, if it won't respond to kill -9, then you can either
> >wait it out or reboot.
> 
> or 'init 1' then 'init 3' to get back to console or 'init 5' to get back 
>   to an X login.

Won't work, i'm affraid. Re-'init'ing does nothing more that stop and
start the right processesby calling the '/etc/init.d' scripts. And those
will use 'kill' to stop services.
If a process doesn't respond to a SIGKILL (aka 'kill -9') it's most like-
ly hanging in kernelspace (_the_ most common reason for this: a process
is trying to access a resource (disk/net io) that's gone). As long as
the process is in an uninteruptable part of the kernel code no signal
will reach it. Reboot, i'm affraid :-/

hth Ralfd

> -- 
> Warren Sanders
> http://MontanaLinux.Org
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> Join us on IRC: lug.boulder.co.us port=6667 channel=#colug