Can't kill processes

[Joe Profaizer]

Started 3 uncompress processes w/ nohup in the background. Then logged off. When I logged back in the processes were on a write statement and not moving.

Tried kill -9 to no avail.

Please consult.

..Joe

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

Zombies? only reboot.

[Rob Smith]

Hi, if you hit those processes with a kill -9 and they are still hanging then the only thing that will get rid of them is a reboot. Probably not what you wanted to hear. What is the status of the 3 processes, are they runninf hogging up resources? Or are they in a defunct state? Hope this helps.

Rob

[Joe Profaizer]

Not in a defunct state. What makes uncompresses just hang? When we run a tusc on the process, it shows a write with running status.

Thanks,

..Joe

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Joe:

If a process is waiting on an I/O then it won't die until allowed to run again. Do you have a parent PID other than one for the hung process?

...JRF...

[Joe Profaizer]

It looks like the problem is it is hanging on the I/O operation so I can't kill it but it never resumes. No parent Pid because it was nohupped and I exited.

[Shannon Petry]

More than likely, your ran the recursive compress without a force option. If you do this, then background and log off, the shell that starts it dies. I have seen this before, where compress or gzip is waiting for user input because a file is already compressed, or will not be reduced in size if it is compressed. Since the shell exits, init now owns the processes, and you can not kill them. You have to reboot.


In the future, make sure that if you are running interactive commands that may require input, use a force option, or an ignore option if it's available so that the user input will not be required.

An alternative is to use screens, which will allow you to reconnect to the tty from a different date/time at which point you would be able to reconnect the session and supply the required user input.

Regards,
Shannon

[Abel Berger]

Hi Joe,

Try rename the file to other name.
In the next I/O the system may be don?t
find the file and any tmout kill the process.

I hope help you.

Regards,

Abel Berger