Killing a process owned by PPID 1 (init)

[PatRoy]

Hi all.

I've got an issue on an HPUX 11.11 server.

I've got a bunch of 'bdf' started (from a shell script) which are "hung". They are all owner by PPID 1 (init). I can't seem to kill -9 them.

How can I get rid of them without rebooting?
This is probably a case for reading the unix for dummies book on my end.. sorry.


Thanks for your help.

Patrick

[Pete Randall]

What are they hung on? I'm guessing maybe a stale NFS mount. If you can get the mount fixed, then the processes should complete. Otherwise, you're going to have to bite the bullet and reboot.


Pete

[PatRoy]

No other way to just kill them hey? This isn't the first time I've had something like this happen to me. Not only with bdf. Isn't there a way to tell init to cleanup or something?

And how can I find out if it's a stale nfs ?

Thanks again.

[Tim Nelson]

hung bdfs are a great indicator of stale non responding NFS mounts. Find the NFS issue and they MAY recover ( most likely not ).

Your only option is a reboot. ( but don't forget to fix the NFS issue else you will be in the same spot again )

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The problem is that these processes are waiting on a higher-priority (such as I/O) so that they will never respond to a signal (kill) until that event is satisfied.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

... and the other part of the story is that if the processes have been inherited by init then these are zombies and cannot be killed --- but they do no real harm either and consume no resources.

[PatRoy]

Well, I understand a bit better now.

However, it really bugs me to see like 25 stalled bdf. I'll have to schedule a reboot.

Thanks all for your help.

Pat

[Dennis Handly]

>Clay: and the other part of the story is that if the processes have been inherited by init then these are zombies and cannot be killed

This is incorrect. Processes that are inherited by init are ones that have had their parents killed, they aren't called zombies.

Zombies aren't inherited by init because init will quickly reap them when the zombie master is killed.

>but they do no real harm either and consume no resources.

These hung bdf processes are taking up resources but hopefully not much.