Today, Scott Garman gleaned this insight:
> I was running 'mt erase' and it seemed to take a long time to complete,
> and so I tried to kill it. No luck. kill -9 doesn't kill it either. I then
> tried power-cylcling the tape drive (it's an external 8mm drive). No luck.
> The process still won't go away, and 'mt stat' tells me that the device is
> busy.
>
> Any ideas on how to kill this thing without bringing the system down (not
> an option until late tonight)?
If you tried to kill it with -9 and that didn't work, the process is
probably hung in I/O wait state, and nothing but a reboot will fix it,
unless it recovers on its own, which is rather unlikely.
Sending a SIGKILL (-9) to a process is a "sure" way to kill the process,
but processes in I/O wait state will not receive the signal until they
come out of I/O wait. If you can't kill it with kill -9, you just can't
kill it... If you do a ps aux you'll probably see that the process's
status is `D' indicating I/O wait state. If it isn't, something on your
system is amiss! :)
--
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
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