kill won't kill

[Bill Campbell]

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
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