Killing a process when kill -9 doesn't work?

Shane Lofgren slofgren at gmail.com
Thu Jul 5 10:18:28 MST 2007


Have you tried killall <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killall>?
-Shane


On 7/5/07, Shawn Badger <badger.shawn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't see any child processes under the rpm's PID and no parent
> processes either. I even killed the shell process that I used to launch the
> rpm command from.  I left it running all day yesterday in hopes that it
> would be cleaned up, but no such luck.
>
> On 7/5/07, Dan Lund <situationalawareness at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The problem with rpm is that you can leave that process there for a
> > week and it won't reap itself.
> > Its a very odd scenario.
> >
> >
> >
> > On 7/5/07, Darrin Chandler < dwchandler at stilyagin.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 08:09:54AM -0700, Dan Lund wrote:
> > > > On 7/5/07, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows at usa.net> wrote:
> > > > > On Thursday 05 July 2007 10:27, after a long battle with
> > technology,
> > > > > Shawn Badger wrote:
> > > > > > how do you kill something when kill -9  doesn't work?
> > > > >
> > > > > You don't, generally.  SIGKILL will kill anything that isn't
> > waiting on
> > > > > a syscall to return.  If something is waiting on a syscall to
> > return
> > > > > for more than about 0.5 seconds, you've got a hardware problem, a
> > > > > kernel bug, or a dead NFS server.  (There's currently a live
> > thread on
> > > > > comp.os.linux.misc about SIGKILL, oddly enough.)
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > No, it does happen with the rpm application rarely, and almost
> > always
> > > > its so honked up that a SIGKILL won't terminate it.
> > > > I've seen it once or twice myself, and it almost always has to do
> > with
> > > > a corrupted rpm database.
> > > > As far as killing it, that's something that I'd love to figure
> > out....
> > > > Though I've only ran into this on new installs when I'm applying
> > > > patches.  I've always just figured itd take less man hours to
> > > > re-install.
> > >
> > > No, he's got it right. There's nothing that -9 won't kill unless the
> > > kernel looks at it and says "oh, I'm not killing that!" The most
> > common
> > > form of this is a zombie process, which is a dead process that the
> > > kernel keeps around waiting for the zombie's child to finish. Let the
> > > child exit on it's own, or kill the child process, and then kernel
> > will
> > > (sooner or later) clean up the zombie itself.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
> > > dwchandler at stilyagin.com    |  http://phxbug.org/      |
> > http://metabug.org/
> > > http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG
> > > Federation
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> >
> >
> > --
> > "Courage is like love; it must have hope to nourish it."
> > -Napoleon Bonaparte
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>
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