Re: Destroying processes

[Justin Hibbits]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 02:21:55PM -0500, Robert Love wrote:
> Cases where kill -9 fail to work are cases where it is supposed to fail.
> 
> You cannot kill zombies, that would break POSIX compliance when the
> parent's called wait.  If you task's parents are not properly calling
> wait() that is an application bug.  If the parent exits, the children
> should be reparented to init and init will reap them via wait().
> 
> You also cannot kill tasks that are sleeping (D in ps/top).  They may
> hold a semaphore or otherwise be in the middle of a critical section. 
> Killing them would be bad bad bad.
> 
> 	Robert Love

Ok, thanks for clearing that up.  My reasoning for wanting this is because a CD
I had mounted with cdfs was screwed up in the mount (file sizes were
misreported, etc), and I couldn't umount it, even tho I could eject it with
cdrecord -eject.  The umount process then went to sleep (with teh 'D' showing
in ps/top), and I couldn't use that drive again until after a reboot.  That's
when I got the idea that I should be able to destroy the process completely,
annihilating everything with it, destroying any connections it has with the
kernel, etc.  I guess it's a bad idea, given your statement :P

Anyway, thanks for the reply,

Justin

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