[CentOS] Bullet proof cron job???

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 22:14, Ted Miller wrote:
> I have a cron job that runs once a day.  There are times when it runs that 
> it disrupts other things on the computer, so I want to kill it.  Under 
> Mandriva I had no problems killing the process, and that was the end of 
> that.  Under Centos I cannot kill it with a sig 15 or a sig 9.  Tonight the 
> process would have trashed hours of work, so after spending two minutes as 
> root trying to kill the process, I ended up killing the entire tree, 
> including crond.  Linux is supposed to allow CONTROL of things like this 
> without rebooting, etc, so why can't I kill the process without killing crond?

Scheduling something that may cause trouble sounds like a problem
in its own right, but Centos shouldn't be doing anything
special to keep signals from reaching processes.  What
kind of error do you get when you issue the kill command?
If you aren't root or the process owner you shouldn't be
permitted to send the signal.  If you are, the process
itself can trap it, but not signal 9.  A kill -9 should
stop anything unless it is hung up in a device driver.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com