On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 09:15, Tony Vance wrote: > What is a kernel panic? How does it happen?
A kernel panic is generally a Bad Thing(tm). Occasionally a Very Bad Thing(tm). It happens when the kernel (the core of Linux responsible for coordinating everything) gets confused. If you're using a development kernel (Or a stable kernel with a brand new VM, but hopefully we'll never go through that again.), it could just mean a bug. With a stable kernel, however, it usually means a hardware failure of some type. A disk going bad, a RAM stick corrupting its contents. That sort of thing. > I've read that locate isn't for all situations. I've read that locate > doesn't search the hard drive, but rather a database that represents the > hard drive. Therefore, locate is only as accurate as the locate > database is current. Is this right? When should I use the find > command? Are there other search commands? If so what are their merits? Correct, locate is only a current as its database. Which usually means the last 24 hours. I pretty much always use find--a very powerful command. For information about command line programs, there's "which", "whereis", "whatis", and "type". The availability of each varies according to OS but usually at least two are available. > How do I kill frozen applications? How do I use the kill command? I've > read the man page, but I'm not sure how to tell what process is frozen > and how to kill it. The best way to tell is experience. Top sometimes also helps. Back in the bad old days of Netscape 4 you could tell when things had gone bad because NS4 would start chewing up 100% CPU. Generally, it a program doesn't respond for an extended period of time it has frozen (whether because of deadlock or something else). If you want to kill all instances you can use "killall" eg. killall netscape-navigator Alternatively, you can use ps, top, gtop, or others to singly out a specific process and kill it by id. kill 1234 You will often see people recommend using 'kill -9'. This should only be used as a last resort. It means "kill with extreme prejudice". Whereas a normal kill politely ask the process to stop (giving it a chance to save any critical data, release shared memory, etc) 'kill -9' just deletes the process from memory. In the case of shared memory and semaphores, you might have to clean that up yourself. Usually only a worry with daemons like a database server. BTW, kill is the program used to send signals to processes. So a 'kill -HUP' is simply sending a sighup to the process. Some will interpret this a request to shutdown, others (like apache) will consider it a request to re-read the config file. -- Stuart Jansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED], AIM:StuartMJansen> "What hole did you dig that up from?" -- my roommate commenting on my taste in music
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