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From: Nikos Vassiliadis <nvass@teledomenet.gr>
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Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 11:03:45 +0300
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Cc: "O. Hartmann" <ohartman@mail.uni-mainz.de>, freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Kill an stopped process
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On Sunday 02 July 2006 14:22, O. Hartmann wrote:
> Sometimes it happens on my FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE/AMD box, that a process,
> in most cases xine, firefox oder thunderbird, show status 'STOP' in top
> and are unkillable!

they are stopped...

> Trying to kill them as root (sending signal 9 throught 'kill' or
> 'killall') doesn't have any effect.
>
> Can anyone help and tell how to kill such a job? The only way  getting
> rid of those processes is reboot the box and this can not be the right way.

You should send a CONT(inue) and then something like TERM(inate). KILL
should be your last choice, since it does what its name says(the process
have no way of controlling this signal, it terminates immediately, given
that's in a state were can be killed). KILL is rarely really needed.

AFAIK this is not FreeBSD specific. I assume It is defined in POSIX.

HTH, Nikos