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

[Dan Lund]

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
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at 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