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24.18. Cleaning Up an Unkillable Process
You or another user might have a process that (according to ps (Section 24.5)) has been sleeping for several days, waiting for input. If you can't kill (Section 23.12) the process, even with kill -9, there may be a bug or some other problem.
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These processes can be unkillable because they've made a request for a hardware device or network resource. Unix has put them to sleep at a very high priority and the event that they are waiting on hasn't happened (because of a network problem, for example). This causes all other signals to be held until the hardware event occurs. The signal sent by kill doesn't do any good.
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If the problem is with a terminal and you can get to the back of the terminal or the back of the computer, try unplugging the line from the port. Also, try typing CTRL-q on the keyboard -- if the user typed CTRL-s while getting a lot of output, this may free the process.
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Ask your vendor if there's a special command to reset the device driver. If there isn't, you may have to reboot the computer.
-- JP
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| 24.17. Processes Out of Control? Just STOP Them |  | 24.19. Why You Can't Kill a Zombie |
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