many tails

[Cameron Simpson]

On 07Dec2006 11:10, Mike - EMAIL IGNORED <m_d_berger_1900 at yahoo.com> wrote:
| PROBLEM SOLVED but there may be another.  I have confirmed
| Andy's description. The reason that I had many persistent
| tail processes is that I run swatch with the --tail-file
| option.  When I kill a swatch process, it leaves a tail
| processes behind, but the tail process no longer receives
| input.  (I discovered this the hard way -- a day after
| killing all my tails, I found that my swatch was no longer
| reporting.)
| 
| The new problem:  what to do (automatically) to eliminate the
| tail when I kill a swatch?

Well, first up it sounds like a bug in swatch. Report it!

You could try to find out if swatch is in its own process group.
If you started it from an interactive shell, or it is in its own
terminal "stand alone", as it were, then this is probably true.

Evn more helpfully, it is probably the process group leader, so the
number of the process group is the same as swatch's pid.

Just as you kill a process with

  kill -s 15 pid-number

you can kill a process group with a negative number.

  kill -s 15 -pgroup-number

 ... but ... you need to disam

You need to use "-s signal' instead of "-signal" because otherwise the
"-pgroup-number" looks like a signal.

Example:

  kill -s 15 -1234

to kill process group "1234" with signal 15 (SIGTERM, the default
signal).

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

At some point, we must recognize that the judiciary is not omniscient, and
that all problems do not require a remedy of constitutional proportions.
        - Justice Clarence Thomas