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

[Tamara Thompson]

The process states that 'ps' outputs are: (from the man page)

D   uninterruptable sleep (usually IO) 
R   runnable  (on run queue)  (eg: running)
S   sleeping   (eg: suspended, could be bcs of a Cntr-Z, etc)
T   traced or stopped
Z   a defunct ('zombie') process

I just found the 'pstree' command while looking for a better explanation of the process states.  pstree will display the processes in tree that shows the relationships between processes, like which ones are child processes.

I've also occassionally had k -9 pid# not kill the process, I think I looked around and made sure I killed the parent process first, then tried it again.  Not an expert on this.  
But since the process numbers are sequential, it's not so hard to find out the order in which the procs started.  

Tamara



>>> Cat <cschmitt at polaris.umuc.edu> 10/13 11:43 AM >>>
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.
> 

I have.  You know how if you do a ps -ax you can see what state each
process is in?  Normally, they are in N state, sometimes R state.  I'm not
exactly sure what the letters stand for, but I think it is Normal and
Reset.  I've done kill -9 on PIDs where the process then went into D
state, but stuck around forever.  Often, if I tried to kill the process
again at that point, it would go into Z state, which I think is Zombie.
I'm probably propagating false information here about what the states
mean, but the change in states I have seen may times.

Cat




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