kill -9 pid seems to kill a process and orphan all child processes. From my understanding a standard SIGTERM signal relies on the receiving process to send termination/whatever signals to it's children, which SIGKILL doesn't give it a chance to do.

So how can I manually send SIGKILL to all children without doing it by hand or having to write a shell script (pstree and some awk/sed could probably do it, but It would be nice if there was a "default" way).

The gdm and child processes don't belong to the same process group, so kill -pid won't do it.



My need for this comes from gnome crashing when I enable certain compiz plugins (buggy video drivers supposedly). The gdm will only respond to SIGKILL, and using this orphans all the children. From this point I need to either restart, or manually SIGKILL all the pids.

Something like 'pkill -KILL -f gdm' or 'pgrep -f gdm|xargs kill -9'? If that doesn't do it, and you are sure it is not due to a version of GDM that really needs to be updated, maybe supply more process info running something like '/bin/ps axf -eo ppid,pid,sid,uid,args --sort=ppid'?