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

[Shawn Badger]

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
> > ---------------------------------------------------
> > 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
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20070705/8266da86/attachment.htm