kill -9

[Chen Khin wai]

Hi

i want to know why some process can't be kill using command kill -9 xxx (xxx is
the pid)? Only a reboot will do.

[Melvyn Burnard_1]

Usually a process cannot ignore SIGKILL (kill -9), unless it is blocked
awaiting completion of some I/O traffic.
This will normally be to something like a tape drive, or disc.
If the unit fails to respond, then the process sits blocked on I/O and will
ignore a kill -9

[Brian Bates_1]

Have you tried using

kill s 9 xxx

instead of just

kill -9 xxx

- Brian

[Chen Khin wai]

Melvyn,

What symptoms causes this situation to occur?

Does this means I have a disk bottleneck or my disk is having problem?

Many Thanks.

[Chen Khin wai]

Brian,

I have not tried kill s 9. BUt I'll try when it occurs again. Actually what's
the difference with kill -9. I don't forsee it works either.

[Brian Bates_1]

I'm not sure if kill -s 9 will work in place of kill -9 for you, but a
colleague of mine recently had similar problems on hp-ux 11 where he said kill
-9 didn't seem to work.

He later told me that using kill -s 9 was now the way to do it, and that kill
-9 was 'defunct'. Whether that is totally true or not I don't know.

Worth a try anyhow, I guess. Let me know if it works for you.

- Brian