killing process question

mokku · 05-29-2008, 03:28 PM

Hi,

I have run rpm command and it just hang, I was about to kill the pid ID, but parent ID is 1. Can I kill the the PID?

mokku · 05-29-2008, 03:29 PM

my question is if the parent id is 1, can we still kill?

lleb · 05-29-2008, 04:07 PM

not sure i understand what you are asking, but i typically will run ps ax | grep (application name i am looking for) if nothing comes up, then i just run ps ax and scroll up looking for the PID, then i will try first kill -9 PID as that is supposed to kill the program + all other applications/programs that are running along with that PID.

dv502 · 05-29-2008, 04:44 PM

Another command to kill a process is top. First search for the PID, then enter the letter k, You will get a PID to kill prompt. Enter the PID and press enter.

Yet another way is pkill. With pkill you enter the application name.

pkill application name

rlhartmann · 05-29-2008, 05:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mokku

my question is if the parent id is 1, can we still kill?

Yes, you can kill a process even if it's parent is "1" to kill a process, you must either own it or be the root user (i.e. sudo). There are a number of processes that show up with the name in brackets like:

Quote:

root 2 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [migration/0]
root 3 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 4 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [migration/1]
root 5 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [ksoftirqd/1]
root 6 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [events/0]
root 7 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [events/1]
root 8 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [khelper]
root 9 1 0 May27 ? 00:00:00 [kthread]

These are actually parts of the kernel and should not be killed.

pinniped · 05-29-2008, 05:17 PM

"my question is if the parent id is 1, can we still kill?"

Yes; that initiates a shutdown.

syg00 · 05-29-2008, 06:08 PM

I don't think the OP is asking if [s]he can kill init, but a task owned by init.

i92guboj · 05-29-2008, 06:34 PM

You can find that the answer to this question is so simple when you notice that, technically, ALL the processes are sons of init (which pid is always 1).

You can easily check that graphically with pstree.