From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jul 21 8:22: 7 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from twwells.com (twwells.com [209.118.236.57]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 3EB1514D27 for ; Wed, 21 Jul 1999 08:22:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from news@twwells.com) Received: from news by twwells.com with local (Exim 1.71 #2) id 116y89-0009x1-00; Wed, 21 Jul 1999 11:18:01 -0400 From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: how to kill processes that don't want to die Message-ID: <7n4oas$159g$1@twwells.com> References: <19990721073946.A2367@converging.net> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 11:18:01 -0400 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In article <19990721073946.A2367@converging.net>, Charlie & wrote: : How do I kill a process gone bad that does not want to die via : the normal 'kill -9 pid' command? I have an instance of tar : that hung when writing to my atapi tape drive, and now there : seems to be no way to get rid of it. When that happens, it means the process is hung in a "close" system call (or the equivalent that happens during exit). Until the close completes, the process will not exit. If the close call cannot complete, the process cannot ever be killed. This is a problem that can occur for any device where activity might occur during the close yet where the device can be off-line. Many drivers don't handle this case very well, so your only solution may be to reboot your machine. You can _try_ turning the drive on and inserting a tape. That might work. Or not. And it might mangle the data on the tape, too. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message