How to dump the locked up program

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 14:04:08 UTC 2009


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.

poc




More information about the fedora-list mailing list