Killing a process whose parent is init

MMacD

MMacD

I have a grep process that refuses to die.. I did kill the shell job that was its parent, but that didn't kill the child, which is now parented by PID 1 (init).

I've tried both the plain kill nnnn and the fancy kill -s KILL nnnn. The fancy one gets me the complaint that arguments should be jobs or process ids. Neither one works.

Is there any way to kill the grep process apart from rebooting?
 
Most likely, the process has an IO problem. What is it reading from, what is it writing to? As ShelLuser asked: what is it's state? Is the rest of the system functioning normally? Any error messages regarding disks or IO in dmesg or /var/log/messages?

If the root cause is a serious IO problem, you may have to reboot anyway.
 
I've had that problem too. For some processes pkill wouldn't work, and neither would kill -9 ####, after finding the id. The only way these processes would die, is if I launched from the terminal, without backgrounding &bg them, then typing ctrl-c. xkill should work for graphical programs, but I couldn't get the hang of controlling it.
 
Thanks, guys. Apparently it went into a decline after my multiple attempts to kill it, and finally died overnight.

I might reboot anyway, because that error message--which I've never seen before--looked fishy to me and isn't mentioned in kill(1)().
 
Well the error message seems to indicate that you've put the process ID at the wrong place, i.e. kill expected a process number but found something else instead.

Also as others have pointed out using ps to get more information about the process state is really helpful to diagnose what the problem might be.
I suspect it might have been as simple as kill <pid> not working because SIGKILL was needed and you somehow you mistyped that.
 
mFP said:
Well the error message seems to indicate that you've put the process ID at the wrong place, i.e. kill expected a process number but found something else instead.

Also as others have pointed out using ps to get more information about the process state is really helpful to diagnose what the problem might be.
I suspect it might have been as simple as kill <pid> not working because SIGKILL was needed and you somehow you mistyped that.
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No.
 
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