How to dump the locked up program
Patrick O'Callaghan
pocallaghan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 16:07:06 UTC 2009
On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 15:30 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Monday 28 September 2009 15:04:08 Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 15:24 +0200, Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> > > Vincent Onelli wrote:
> > > > Hello all,
> > > > Is there way to dump the program stop responding, instead of do a full
> > > > reboot?.
> > >
> > > What you are calling "dump" is probably called "kill" in the Unix
> > > world. And program is better spelled process.
> > >
> > > So, a simple Google search for "How do I kill a process in Linux?"
> > > will give you a lot of answers.
> > >
> > > In a console:
> > > kill 666
> > > (where 666 is the PID of the process)
> > >
> > > Via GUI, it depends on GNOME, KDE, whatever you are using (it could be
> > > Ctrl-Esc or similar key commands).
> >
> > A couple of extra points:
> >
> > 1) The "kill" command doesn't technically kill the process, it sends it
> > a signal. "kill -l" gives a list of possible signals. The default signal
> > (SIGTERM) can be caught by the process. This is to allow it to clean up
> > before finishing (and it might decide not to finish at all). SIGKILL on
> > the other hand cannot be caught.
> >
> > 2) Sometimes a process cannot be killed even with SIGKILL (because it's
> > waiting in the kernel on some event that will never happen) and a reboot
> > is the only answer.
> >
> In many distros the key-combination ctrl-alt-Esc starts kill - producing a
> skull and crossbones icon, which you then move to the titlebar of the gui
> application you want to kill. If you change your mind, Esc gets you out of
> it.
Interesting, I'd never seen that. It seems to be the same as the xkill
command, which I sometimes find useful. However the OP didn't say he
wanted to kill a GUI client. Also, xkill doesn't send any signals, it
just closes the connection from the X client to the X server. Most
clients then commit suicide, but nothing forces them to.
poc
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