commandeering a terminal session

[Jordan Bean]

We have a oracle dbreorg running in a telnet login from a citrix server. The dba has lost communication with the citrix server which must be rebooted. We're afraid that the dbreorg may terminate with the login shell when the telnet connection is broken. The dba neglected to use nohup. Is it possible to commandeer the session from another terminal? Is it possible to instruct the login shell not to hangup through signals?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Jordan,

Sorry, I think you are stuck. All you can do is hope that the Citrix box keeps the connection to the Unix box. There is no way to insert a new signal handler (which is what a trap statement does) from outside the process.

Clay

[Jordan Bean]

Unfortunately, the citrix box had to be rebooted since all the users were getting stuck in their sessions. That terminated the telnet connection, which terminated the login shell. We were hoping the dbreorg would orphan, but it terminated as well leaving behind a few zombies. I'm confident that they'll recover just fine. Thanks anyway.

[Marty Hoff]

In the future to avoid this problem, you could set nohup on your login shell or specifically nohup the dbreorg process when you start it so that if the shell gets killed, the children processes will continue.