Killing

[prince_kenshi]

I need a little help so a certain problem hopefully won't hurt me anymore. I was trying to record a wav sound to test it out but the program crashed. It did leave a wav file though so I tried to play it. Then wavp locked up and ctrl c wouldn't work. So I switched to another terminal and tried kill followed by kill -9 and it was still on the screen. So then I had to kill -9 bash just to get the thing off the screen, but it was still running in the background. And the worst thing is that every time I received an ICQ message, another wavp would open in the background. Within minutes, all of my 256 megs of RAM had been filled up. I finally had to restart the computer just to get rid of the problem. This isn't the first time I've had this problem either. What I would like to know is if there's a way to get rid of the program when even kill -9 won't work. I hate to have to reset my computer every time a program locks up severely. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[mandreko]

i normally find occasionally you can do "ps -aux" to find it's running pid, and then do "kill insert_pid_here". Sometimes that kills what killall -9 won't... I'm not sure why.

[mis]

Originally posted by mandreko:
i normally find occasionally you can do "ps -aux" to find it's running pid, and then do "kill insert_pid_here". Sometimes that kills what killall -9 won't... I'm not sure why.

If I am not mistaken there is also the option of kill -KILL to kill it reguardless of consequences and there is kill -TERM to terminate properly then kill.

[Lorithar]

*hmms*

killall -TERM (applcation id)
killall -SIGKILL (application id)

When I first setup X 4.0.2 the original savage driver I installed trashed my display on exit .. the process to get back to working was to telnet in, killall -TERM xdm
and restart xdm .. to refresh the framebuffer.

killall -l will list the SIGNAL names on your system.
kill -9 should be enough to toss the process.. If it isn't dying, the question to ask is does it have a parent...
You may have to kill AND restart the parent to finally drift the application out.

[prince_kenshi]

Mandreko: I already tried a normal kill. I always try it before I go to kill -9 unless I'm certain that it won't work.

I'm going to save this page and try these things out if that ever happens again. Actually I can probably test it out by playing that wav again. There's no parent process to it by the way. I'll probably test out these ideas later tonight when I don't care if I have to reset. Thanks for the help.

[prince_kenshi]

I've learned a little more and thought some of you might be interested. I decided to try again to figure out how to kill this program so I tried playing the wav I made before. It actually played the wav this time without an error. Then I recorded another one. Wavr crashed just like last time and closed. Then I used wavp to play it. Just like wavr, it crashed but closed. I tried once more and got just what I wanted. The program was stuck on the screen. So I switched to another terminal and started issueing the commands listed here. None of them managed to kill the program. I tried kill -9 -1 which was listed as an example in the man page and it killed everything except that program. So I ran a ps aux and saw that the aggravating program was the only one listed with a status code of D. I looked this up and it seems to mean that the program is in an uninterruptible sleep. So I guess what I've learned from all this is that the program is immortal, hogs my sound card so that other programs have to wait forever, and can only be vanquished by resetting the computer. Does anyone have any final ideas before this case is closed?