Process not killed by kill -9

[Shivkumar]

Dear Sirs,

In what scenerio "kill -9 process id" command would fail to kill the process ?
In such scenario how to kill that particular process ?

Thanks,
Shiv

[Indira Aramandla · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You can do a ps -ef | grep process-id to see if the process still exists. Then you can kill the process. Make sure you kill the child and then the parent so as not leave any process hung.


IA

[Rajeev Shukla]

Any process waiting for a resource will not die till resource has been released. kill -9 is a force kill which should kill all the process until its a zombie process which wont die until you reboot the system or release the resource

[Mel Burslan]

processes which can not be killed by kill -9 command are the ones who are running at kernel priority level more than likely waiting for a signal which may or may not come. Some refer to these processes as zombies but this is not always the case. Some processes, due to a possible sloppy programming or some unexpected and untrapped condition, raise their priority level to that of kernel processes, at which point they become unsignallable. So, which ever signal you try to send them, including almighty SIGKILL (a.k.a. -9) is ignored. The only way for these processes to die is either the condition they are waiting for to be met or reboot of the server.

[Cem Tugrul]

Shiv,

Seems you have zombie proc so only way to
repel it just reboot your box.

Good Luck,

[Mahesh Kumar Malik]

Hi Shiv

Kill the child process first before the parent one. If it is zombie process, reboot will kit it.

Regards
Mahesh