Steven downing wrote:
> So finally my question is, is there a way to kill something which isn't responding
>to those signals. And zombies?
You know, the strangest things happen when your reading a really good
O'Reilly Unix book...
>From "Unix Power Tools"
----------
Cleaning Up an Unkillable Process
You or another user might have a process that (according to ps) has been
sleeping for several days, waiting for input. If you can't kill the
process, even with kill -9, there may be a bug or some other problem.
- These processes can be unkillable because they've made a request for a
hardware device or network resource. UNIX has put them to sleep at a
very high priority and the event that they are waiting on hasn't
happened (because of a network problem, for example). This causes *all*
other signals to be held until the hardware event occurs. The signal
sent by kill doesn't do any good.
[irrelevent bits cut]
- Ask your vendor is there's a special command to reset the device
driver. If there isn't, you may have to reboot the computer.
----------
So there you go.
Zombies? From said book:
----------
You cannot kill zombies; they are already dead.
[cut]
So, to get rid of a zombie, you must wait for it. If you have already
done so or if the process' PPID is 1, the process is almost certainly
stuck in a device driver close routine, and if it remains that way
forever, the driver has a bug.
----------
Matthew
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