kill won't kill

[Garrett Cooper]

Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Sun, May 20, 2007, Remko Cijffers wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm running a python script which has stopped responding. Killing off 
>> the process doesn't work:
>>
>>> # ps -ax | grep nzb | grep -v grep
>>> 48426  p1  TLs  136:51.62 /usr/local/bin/python /usr/local/bin/hellanzb.py
>>> # kill -SIGKILL 48426
>>> # ps -ax | grep nzb | grep -v grep
>>> 48426  p1  TLs  136:51.62 /usr/local/bin/python /usr/local/bin/hellanzb.py
>> The only tip I could find seems to reference the 'wait for lock' flag 
>> ('L' in ps output). A lock could come from samba but restarting the 
>> daemon doesn't solve the problem.
> 
> Typically unkillable processes are the result of hanging on some file or
> device that's waiting on kernel services which never return.
> 
> Using ``lsof -p pid'' to see that the process is using at may give a hint
> as to what it's hanging on.
> 
> On Linux systems I frequently use ``strace -p pid'' to see what a process
> is doing.  I don't know the FreeBSD equivalent of strace.
> 
> Bill
> --
> INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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> 
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> 		-- Cameron Hawley

	That would be truss(1).
	strace is also in ports if you prefer to use it.
-Garrett