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Re: When kill -9 won't do



On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 09:48:28AM -0500, Kent West wrote:
> Other than rebooting the machine, is there a stronger kill signal than -9 ?
> 
> I was scp'ing some files from a CD drive on the remote machine; the
> process hung, so I ctrl-C'd on my end. Then I ssh'd into the remote
> machine, and I see the scp process is still running. I've been unable to
> kill it. Any ideas? (Also, any process on the cdrom, such as "ls
> /cdrom", also hangs, and I can't kill it either.)
> 
It is stuck on a blocking I/O call somewhere in the kernel.  This
happened to me when a friend plugged a faulty USB key into my machine.
I had to reboot it after 77 days :-(

The reason is that completely killing a process that is lost in the
kernel is a Bad Idea(TM).  The `kill -9` just zombifies the process
until it returns from the kernel and then it dies naturally.

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto

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