kill -KILL fails to kill process

[Chuck Swiger]

On Sep 19, 2008, at 10:41 AM, Steve Franks wrote:
> The only way to get rid of it is to
> reboot.  Now, given the behavior, I'd have to suspect something
> underlying as the true source of the problem, but shouldn't kill kill
> it anyway - I mean, isn't there some way to kill a process that's
> stuck waiting on a child process?

Delivery of signals can be delayed if the process is blocked in a  
system call, until that call completes and returns control to the  
process in userland.  That includes kill -9, unfortunately...

-- 
-Chuck