[techtalk] Is there a Kill -8, too?

[jenn at simegen.com]

Nils Philippsen wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Just This Girl wrote:
> 
> > I'm afraid I don't really know the answer to that one. I've never had a
> > kill -9 *not* work on a pid.
> 
> There are situations where a kill -9 won't work, e.g. when the process to
> be killed currently is in a system call (it's process state 'D' aka
> 'uninterruptible sleep' with ps or top). The process will be killed as
> soon as it returns from the system call. If it doesn't, there's the
> Windows solution: reboot the machine :-)

Nils is right (or at least, *I* think so).

If a process is in the middle of a system call (such as I/O, disk reading,
whatever), it can't be killed while doing the system call.

That's the main reason. There's also 

* parent processes respawning new children (which will have new PIDs)
* lack of permission to kill the process (a user can't kill a root 
process)




Jenn V.
-- 
  Humans are the only species to feed and house entirely separate species 
     for no reason other than the pleasure of their company. Why?

jenn at simegen.com        Jenn Vesperman        http://www.simegen.com/~jenn/

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