open office freeze

[Charles Swiger]

On Mar 21, 2005, at 11:38 AM, FreeBSD Questions wrote:
> I too have this problem on my laptop.  I was wondering if there is any
> trick to killing a run away process like open office.  I have tried to
> kill -9 it to no avail and killing its parent process only makes it
> change its parent process to init.  I usually end up restarting but
> that is sub optimal.  There must be some way to kill a process
> regardless of its state.

For what it's worth, you might do better to try "kill -HUP" a process 
first, then "kill -TERM", before resorting to "kill -9" (aka "kill 
-KILL").  Using less than maximum force gives the process a chance to 
notice it is supposed to go away and shut down more cleanly.  This may 
help.

However, if you do get a process stuck which won't go away when you 
kill -9 it, consider doing a "ps axl" and see what it's WCHAN is stuck 
on.  (BTW, be sure you can discriminate between a zombie waiting for a 
parent to reap it's exit status, ie, "STAT" is "Z"...)

-- 
-Chuck