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 wrote: > On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 08:09:54AM -0700, Dan Lund wrote: > > On 7/5/07, Matt Graham 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@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ > http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG > Federation > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > -- "Courage is like love; it must have hope to nourish it." -Napoleon Bonaparte --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss