On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, William L. Maltby wrote: > > On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 10:04 -0800, nate wrote: >> <snip> > >>> Second question - A newly installed server consisting of CentOS 5.2, >>> straight >>> off the DVD, I invoke a command by hand, realize I want to kill it soon >>> after >>> (logged in as root). I issue ps auwx|grep name_of_command, get the PID, and >>> issue kill -9 PID. ps auwx|grep name_of_command is still running. >>> >>> The command is NOT part of any scheduled job. Why won't the process die? >> >> Is the process state "D" or "Z" ? Frequently either of these states >> can trigger an unkillable process. Sometimes "Z" (zombies) can be >> killed but often times they can't be directly killed. And if the >> process is in "D" then it is stuck waiting for I/O(most often) and >> you have to wait for it to complete, or reboot, sometimes going to >> single user mode and back again works as well, and sometimes killing >> other processes that the stuck one depends on can sometimes free it >> up so it can die. I discovered, by chance, the Xen kernel was getting in the way. I booted to the non-Xen kernel and all is well. Scott