[wplug] killing process that will not die

Alexandros Papadopoulos apapadop at andrew.cmu.edu
Wed Aug 6 11:00:23 EDT 2003


On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, John Harrold wrote:

> Sometime in August Alexandros Papadopoulos assaulted the keyboard and produced:
>
> | What did top/ps have to say of the process state? Could it be "D" (waiting
> | for disk I/O), or have a child process that did (check with ps auxf).
>
> i don't remember what the process state was. he needed to use mozilla for
> mail, so i told him to reboot. i just wanted to know how to deal with this
> for future reference. what would i do in the case where the process is
> waiting for disk io?

Wait? :-)

I think the "D" state is not even killable by root, not sure though.

> | Otherwise, did he run kill -9 as root?
>
> no we ran it as his user. i thought that would be enough since he owned the
> process.

Theoretically I don't see why, but in practice I've had to do that some
times. Perhaps the priority assigned to a kill signal is higher than
anything, when sent by root, but is "queueable" when sent by a mortal.
Speculating here, someone with firm knowledge of signals please shed some
light. :-)

-A



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