Can't kill a process

[Ed Greshko]

Simon Slater wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 08:39 +0200, A.J. Bonnema wrote:
>> Have you tried "kill -9 <pid>"?
>> Guus.
>>
>> Simon Slater wrote:
>>> 	A quick question for someone: a process running as root can't be killed
>>> by kill PID.  How do I kill it?
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> Simon
>>>
>> -- 
>> A.J. Bonnema, Leiden The Netherlands,
>> user #328198 (Linux Counter http://counter.li.org)
>>
> Thanks Guus,

Of course "kill -9" is not always the best course of action.  That is using
a sledge hammer and causes the process to terminate unconditionally and
unpredictably.  In cases where the process has cached data that it hasn't
written to disk as of yet you may be faced with a loss of data.  I would
first try sending a "kill -2" or "kill -6".