Re: force quit


Subject: Re: force quit
From: Charlie Watts (cewatts@frontier.net)
Date: Mon Feb 18 2002 - 00:19:36 MST


On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Mark Jaffe wrote:

> >Occasionally applications in KDE (or any other desktop
> >environment) will freeze. Is there any way to force
> >an individual application that has frozen to quit? Is
> >this achieved, (if it is possible), through the
> >console environment? Any help would be greatly
> >appreciated. Thanks.
> >
>
> Quitting an application in Linux is accomplished through the console.
> You need to get the process ID of the offending application by scanning
> the process list, obtained by typing "ps aux" which will list ALL
> running processes, sorted by their ID in the first column. You may need
> to expand the console beyond 80 columns to see the whole line. Then you
> issue a "kill -9 <pid>" command to stop the process you wish.

Ack, I really, really recommend you try less violent versions of kill
first.

As stolen from Randal L. Schwartz's periodic "Useless Use of Kill -9
award":

No no no. Don't use kill -9.

It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:

1) shut down socket connections

2) clean up temp files

3) inform its children that it is going away

and so on and so on and so on.

Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't
work, send 2, and if that doesn't work, send 1. If that doesn't,
REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is badly behaved!

Don't use kill -9. Don't bring out the flamethrower just to light a
fire.

-- 
Charlie Watts
cewatts@frontier.net
Frontier Internet, Inc.
http://www.frontier.net/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Mon Feb 18 2002 - 00:32:41 MST