when does kill -9 pid not work?

[Paul De Bra]

In article <20495 at adm.BRL.MIL> Leisner.Henr at xerox.com (Marty) writes:
}On a sun386 running sunOS4.0, I was playing around with Minix boot disks in
}a DOS window.
}
}I had an infinite loop in my boot loader, and I couldn't kill the DOS task
}via a
}kill -9 pid
}which I always though always worked (I tried doing it as rooot after my own
}account didn't work).
}
}I did a shutdown (geez, maybe it knows something I don't know) and it said:
}
}"Something is hung--won't die, ps axl advised".
}

kill -9 pid (executed as the owner of the process or as root) is
guaranteed to work.

when the process exits (due to the kill -9) it may get stuck in a device
driver or something, so it enters a "zombie" state. This means that the
process is busy exiting, but hasn't quite gone far enough to tell init that
it's really gone.

in any case for your purpose the kill -9 must have stopped the infinite
loop. had you executed ps a couple of times then you should have noticed
that the process was no longer consuming cpu-time. it should also have been
marked as <exiting> instead of its own name.

Paul.
>I give up...Was Jason in my machine?
>
>marty
>ARPA:	leisner.henr at xerox.com
>GV:  leisner.henr
>NS:  leisner:wbst139:xerox
>UUCP:	hplabs!arisia!leisner
> 


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