cannot kill a process

[Luca Ferrari]

On Friday 11 January 2008 Paul Dwerryhouse's cat, walking on the keyboard, 
wrote:
> 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.


I've tried to kill the process either with quit or kill but the process are 
still there, listed in the process table (I can see them with ps).

Luca