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

[Matt Graham]

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.)

> My RPM database has become funky and now I have an rpm process that 
> will not close no matter what I have tried and I really hate resorting 
> to the M$ fix. 

Check dmesg for OOPS or BUG reports.

-- 
  Back in my day, all we had were 0's.  We painted them different colors
  to tell them apart.  Once this started bogging the processes down, we
  switched to naming them.  I still miss Bob.  --skritch on a.f.c (1998)
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see