Can't kill process

[Dmitry Morozovsky]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Michael Sig Birkmose wrote:

MSB> I am currently running FreeBSD 4.9, and I have a user who somehow managed
MSB> to get some dead bash processes. I have repeatedly attempted to kill -9
MSB> this process without any luck. The way I understood it was that kill -9 was an
MSB> "offer that the process can't refuce" :) I.e. that the process would be
MSB> terminated no matter wat by the OS?
MSB>
MSB> I tried man kill, and noticed that some shells might have a builtin kill
MSB> command. Therefore I even tried running /bin/kill explicitly with no
MSB> further luck.
MSB>
MSB> Does anyone have an idea of what I have to do, in order to kill the
MSB> proces?

If a process is a zombie (haven't got proc table entry fully defined) or has
called blocking system call which is blocked (such as disk read request to bad
disk media, or NFS read request to NFS server which is not reachable), then
such process is unkillable.

>From ``man ps'':

     state   The state is given by a sequence of characters, for example,
             ``RWNA''.  The first character indicates the run state of the
             process:

	D       Marks a process in disk (or other short term, uninter-
		ruptible) wait.
[snip]
        Z       Marks a dead process (a ``zombie'').


Sincerely,
D.Marck                                     [DM5020, MCK-RIPE, DM3-RIPN]
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*** Dmitry Morozovsky --- D.Marck --- Wild Woozle --- marck at rinet.ru ***
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