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

[Kelly Lynn Martin]

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999 20:45:01 +0300, Jane Susi <jane.susi at mail.ee> said:

>I'm sorry, if I bother you with a really silly question, but...what
>shall I do, if this "kill -9" just does'nt work? Not very long time
>ago it just happened, so what to do for avoiding such situation??

If kill -9 doesn't work, it means that the process you are trying to
kill is waiting on a "fast resource" (waits for fast resources are not 
interruptable).  Usually this means the process is waiting on a disk
drive or for memory to be swapped in.  This appears as a "D" in ps
(for "disk wait").

Also, you can't kill "zombie" processes (which appear with a "Z" in
ps), but zombies are processes which have already died and are being
held in limbo by the kernel waiting for their parents to find out.
Zombies take up an extremely small amount of memory, so they're not a
major concern, and are usually evidence of poorly-written code.

If you can't kill -9 a process and it's neither a zombie nor in a disk
wait, then your kernel is unstable and you should probably reboot. :)

Kelly

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