cannot kill a process

Paul Dwerryhouse paul at dwerryhouse.com.au
Fri Jan 11 10:52:06 UTC 2008


On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 10:05:26AM +0100, Luca Ferrari wrote:
> I've got a backup script that is running trhu crontab, and now I noted that 
> there are several instances still active (not zombie), and I'd like to kill 
> them, but I'm unable. Trying with kill and killall but cannot see the process 
> dying ..... Such processes use tar to make the backup on an IDE disk. I'm 
> using ubuntu 6.06. Any idea about?

First try a kill -QUIT a couple of times, eg:

	kill -QUIT 4324

(where 4324 is the process ID, use ps -ef to find it)

If that still doesn't work, then you may have to resort to -KILL:

	kill -KILL 4324

Using -KILL is always a last resort. It will kill the process without
cleaning up any files that it was using, so it may leave it in a bad
or even unusable state; beware.

Cheers,

Paul

-- 
Paul Dwerryhouse                             	| PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584
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