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

[Lynn David Newton]

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

killall is not capable of killing anything any more
certainly than kill -9. It's just a little fancier way
to kill groups of processes -- if you know what you're
killing. It's also great for screwing up your machine
big time if you don't.

  >> I don't see any child processes under the rpm's
  >> PID and no parent processes either. ...

Look for your process using ps -ef. If the PPID (parent
process) is 1 (init), it's probably gone asynchronous
on you, meaning it's a zombie, and there's little you
can do to clean it up if you can't determine what
process is waiting on some resource and you're unable
to determine what to do to satisfy the condition.

The good news about a zombie process is that it doesn't
eat up any CPU time. It just sits there in the process
table occupying a slot. It's annoying to see it, and
may prevent you from starting a fresh iteration,
depending on what it is, but it's otherwise harmless.

It's possible that lsof might be useful. It gives lots
of output, but look for your process in the PID column
and look at what files it has open (keeping in mind
that in the Unix world *everything* is conceptually
speaking a file, including printers and disk drives and
other devices).

I've had the experience of seeing something hanging on
my CD drive and looked down to see it was open. Closing
it made the problem go away.

Just a suggestion.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ