Jerry Feldman wrote:

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:58:42 -0600 Donald D Henson wrote:

...

I seem to have gotten myself into a situation where a Firefox process will not die nor will it display anything. (The problem seems to have something to do with You Tube.) When I try to start up another instance of Firefox, I get an error message that tells me to either close the current process or to reboot the system. Rebooting is not a good solution. I remember from the 'old days' that there is a cli command to identify a process id and another one to kill a process. I've searched my memory and the User Manual but cannot identify those two commands. Any assistance will be sincerely appreciated.

Try ctrl-alt-Esc. That brings up a skull and crossbones. Click it in the offending window and you will kill the process.

From the command line: ps ax | grep -i firefox then kill -9

Normally I use kill -TERM first, and if that does not kill the process, then use -9.

How about in KDE <CTRL><ALT><ESC> which brings up a skull and crossbow. However over the GUI you want killed and press the left mouse button. Bob

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On Tuesday 20 March 2007 12:37, Randall R Schulz wrote:

...

      kill -9 <PID>

Absolutely a bad idea. Many programs have clean-up operations to perform. This guarantees those clean-up actions will not take place.

Signal TERM or 15 is the clean way to kill a process. Only resort to KILL or 9 when TERM does not cause the process to terminate. Yup, except that what we are talking about here is a process that won't die... kill -9 <PID> is the ONLY way to get it to happen.

Another way to say this is that if SIGTERM will kill the process then you probably didn't need to be in an xterm window running the kill command in the first place. The usual reason for a process to "refuse to die" is that it is no longer correctly performing signal handling, so giving it the SIGTERM is useless. kill -9 <PID> is the only way to go in these situations. -- Kind regards, M Harris <>< -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

What a rapid response from so many. The best part is that most of the advice is consistent. It seems that I have been dealing with the GUI too much. I should use the CLI more often. Thanks for all the help. The CLI (eg. the shells) are always available in Linux and Unix systems. The GUI simply sits on top of the system. This is one reason why we can have many different GUI's on Linux. One little trick we use on occasion is if for some reason the GUI hangs and we can't get a response, we can log in via the network and simply kill the GUI. Both KDE and GNOME have matured enough that it is rare to experience a lockup. Just remember that most Linux systems have 6 virtual terminals

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:12:13 -0600 Donald D Henson wrote: that are totally independent of the GUI. Each virtual terminal corresponds to a function key (F1 - F6). F7 is used for the first session, and you can even have multiple GUI sessions. When I teach my Linux course, I generally have both KDE and GNOME running. In contrast, Windows NT does not have an underlying CLI. The command prompt runs as a subordinate process. The down side of Linux is that you have so many choices it can be overwhelming, especially for new users. Since I have a degree from Burger King's Whopper College (this is true) I tend to prefer the "have it your way" approach rather than the "you can have any color you want as long as it is black". -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Sat, 2007-03-24 at 14:51 +0200, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:

Donald D Henson wrote:

Hi Donald,

...

I seem to have gotten myself into a situation where a Firefox process will not die nor will it display anything. (The problem seems to have something to do with You Tube.) When I try to start up another instance of Firefox, I get an error message that tells me to either close the current process or to reboot the system. Rebooting is not a good solution. I remember from the 'old days' that there is a cli command to identify a process id and another one to kill a process. I've searched my memory and the User Manual but cannot identify those two commands. Any assistance will be sincerely appreciated.

I think the command you are looking for is 'top' ie executed from an unprivleged user: $> top

This will give you a listing of the processes and their pid' although with the update frequency set high, it is difficult to identify the correct pid as the lines of the displayed processes keep changing.

While top is running hit the "h" key which will bring up a list of configurable settings. The "d or s" key can be used to change the update frequency to something longer than 3 seconds making it easier to catch the pid of the process you kill. Hit the "k" key to be able to enter the pid and the kill level of the process you want to kill. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 24 March 2007 07:16, riccardo35@gmail.com wrote:

whereas, I am sure there are 1000 reasons why it is not a good script,

. . . the following script "kl" usually works :-

Do you actually use that script? The process IDs produced will include that of the grep command, which will be gone by the time the kill occurs and thus elicit a diagnostic. Because the pattern is not bounded, or otherwise contextualized, it may find unrelated processes whose name, arguments or other ps output fields contain the target string specified. Using kill -9 as the first recourse inn terminating a process is usually inappropriate, but sometimes necessary. As I've said before, the "pidof" program is specifically designed to return the process IDs of those processes running a specific command. That's what should be used for this purpose. The default SIGTERM (15) should be used first and only if that fails to stop the process should SIGKILL (9) be used. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 24 March 2007 09:16, riccardo35@gmail.com wrote:

whereas, I am sure there are 1000 reasons why it is not a good script, ... kill -9 ...

There is 1000 and first, not to use kill -9 as a regular procedure. All users that render their system useless because they used too often kill -9 will tell you that Linux is as bad as any other OS, as applications are not running (lock files are not removed), failing one by one (as user applies kill -9). What kill -9 does is to turn power switch off for the affected application. Many applications will refuse to start because they check only if there is their own lock file, and as previous run finished withoot giving program chance to remove lock file it will not run, like Firefox in first post of this thread. The signal 9 is mighty tool if used for what it is intended. To remove processes that doesn't respond to normal request to quit, but used everywhere it is more like using hammer to center picture on your monitor ;-) -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 24 March 2007, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:

Donald D Henson wrote:

Hi Donald,

...

I seem to have gotten myself into a situation where a Firefox process will not die nor will it display anything. (The problem seems to have something to do with You Tube.) When I try to start up another instance of Firefox, I get an error message that tells me to either close the current process or to reboot the system. Rebooting is not a good solution. I remember from the 'old days' that there is a cli command to identify a process id and another one to kill a process. I've searched my memory and the User Manual but cannot identify those two commands. Any assistance will be sincerely appreciated.

I think the command you are looking for is 'top' ie executed from an unprivleged user: $> top

This will give you a listing of the processes and their pid' although with the update frequency set high, it is difficult to identify the correct pid as the lines of the displayed processes keep changing.

Rather use one of the other post' recommendations.

Regards Hylton ===========

Donald, Another program that works very well is ksysguard. It's a very good gui for viewing the processes running and allows you to kill them easily. Just use ctrl-esc keys to activate it from your KDE interface. Also, if you guys love "top" a lot, take a look at "htop"! I don't know if SuSE has a rpm for this or not, but it would be worth someone building. Maybe Packman has it. It also runs from the command line but makes using top so much easier! Plus, you have the complete list of programs running at a glance with the ability to kill, etc. any, much like ksysguard. It's also mouse & cursor keys accessible. And Donald, You Tube & Flash seem to be a constant source of problems such as you experienced. Maybe Adobe will get it right one day or people will just quit using it. regards, Lee -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 24 March 2007 20:23, BandiPat wrote:

....

Also, if you guys love "top" a lot, take a look at "htop"! ...

That looks interesting, but I cannot seem to find one feature of top that I like to use, namely top's "n" command which allows you to limit the number of processes shown. Does htop have an equivalent I'm not seeing?

regards, Lee

Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Sat, 2007-03-24 at 23:23 -0400, BandiPat wrote:

On Saturday 24 March 2007, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:

...

Donald D Henson wrote:

Hi Donald,

...

I seem to have gotten myself into a situation where a Firefox process will not die nor will it display anything. (The problem seems to have something to do with You Tube.) When I try to start up another instance of Firefox, I get an error message that tells me to either close the current process or to reboot the system. Rebooting is not a good solution. I remember from the 'old days' that there is a cli command to identify a process id and another one to kill a process. I've searched my memory and the User Manual but cannot identify those two commands. Any assistance will be sincerely appreciated.

-snip- This thread branched off into talking about 'top', 'htop' and other utilities, but the original poster is best served (IMHO) by the two cli utilities from bash, namely 'ps' and 'kill'. In a terminal enter 'ps aux' to see a list of processes with pid (process ID) and user. Identify the pid you want and then enter 'kill yyyy' where 'y' is the pid number. You can do this as a user only if the pid belongs to you, but must be superuser to kill root and other user pids. Sometimes a pid won't die and you have to enter 'kill -9 xxxx'. Other times a zombie process won't die whatever you do, usually when hardware is involved, such as a dvd drive. Sadly, in that case you DO have to reboot, because even killing X won't affect the zombie. See 'man ps' and 'man kill'. Gavin -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org