When kill doesnt work, how to kill a process ?

Hi All,

I am unable to kill a process using kill command. I am using HP-UX system. I have tried with kill -9 and i have root privilages.

How can i terminate this daemon ? ? ?

Regards,
Vijay Hegde

1 Like

If it has died and is now a zombie, killing the parent process will cause it to be re-parented to init which will reap it. But if it is sleeping at a high kernel priority, the only general answer is to reboot the system. Since you're on HP-UX, you should use glance to examine the process and determine what it is waiting for. Then there is some chance that you can correct it. For example, if it is trying to close a tape drive that has been powered off, bringing the tape drive back online may allow the close to succeed. Or maybe it is trying to write to /dev/console and someone typed an X-off (control s), so typing an X-on (control q) may allow the write to finish. If it is doing disk i/o to an NFS mounted filesystem with nointr, fixing the NFS server or the network may do it. Or maybe it is a bug in the kernel and so you want to identify what resource it is waiting for and then check for patches that look applicable. This won't help kill the particular process you have now, but patching the kernel would insure it doesn't keep on happening.

Thank you for your reply. I had reboted the server.. but was unable to get the root cause. There was no disk problem, it was using NFS nor was waiting for any other i/o. It was using around 90% CPU and was in running state.

I was unable to get what was happening.

Vijay Hegde

Kinda hard to tell what process was the parent, since it obviously ended and you only have a ppid to go by, and unless these are recorded... anyway, net time, try the wait command. I've seen times up to 20 minutes until the zombie goes away, but it beats rebooting.