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Date:      Sat, 22 Jun 1996 12:31:03 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Brian Tao <taob@io.org>
To:        FREEBSD-QUESTIONS-L <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>, FREEBSD-HACKERS-L <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Cc:        brian@mediacity.com
Subject:   Killing "unkilliable" processes waiting to drain tty
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.92.960622122302.9476C-100000@zap.io.org>

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    Way back in the mists of time, Brian Litzinger wondered how one
would go about killing a process that was stuck waiting for its tty to
drain when exiting.  Processes like that would look something like this:

taob     18335  0.0  0.0   772   16  p6- IEs+ 15Jun96    0:00.31 -tcsh (tcsh)
taob     16294  0.0  0.0   776   12  pe- IEs  Sat05PM    0:00.29  (tcsh)
taob     16315  0.0  0.0  1888   16  pe- IE+  Sat05PM    0:00.46  (pine392)

    You could kill -9 them all you want, but they would not go away.
I didn't see any resolution to the immediate question of "How do I get
rid of these processes, besides rebooting?" (search for
"indestructible processes" in the freebsd-questions archives), and the
problem still exists in the latest 2.2-SNAP.

    Anyhow, to make a long story short, try this:

cat < /dev/ttyXX       # replace XX as appropriate

    I don't know why I didn't try this before... it seems so
blindingly obvious now.  I was able to recover 7 tty's from a dozen
stuck processes today.  Phew.
--
Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org, taob@ican.net)
Systems and Network Administrator, Internet Canada Corp.
"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"




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