[NCLUG] Can't kill process

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 05:36:26PM -0700, BJ Tiemessen wrote:
>I have a hung process than just won't die.  I was trying to install an 
>RPM off a cdrom and now rpmdrake is hung and my cdrom drive has been 
>spinning for a few hours.  I've spent an hour searching the internet and 

Often the inability to kill a process means that it's stuck waiting for
some particular resource in the kernel.  Particularly if you can't "kill
-9" it.  If you do a "ps -awlx", what does the STAT column say?  I bet
it's "D", which is "Uninterruptible sleep", usually meaning that it's
waiting on I/O.  I don't know of any way short of rebooting to clear
this.

'Z' for STAT means that it's a zombie process, waiting for it's parent
process to read it's exit status.

Sean
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Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
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