kill -9 and respawns as new pid
 

I have a process here that I can't get rid of.

As soon as I kill the process it respawns with a new pid. Same with `kill -9` and `kill -15`.

Looking through the process list shows no clues as to any parent process, but from memory I believe the original command was `while :; do <command> ;done`

So that's

while true; do run_this_command; done

so obviously it's going to keep respawning. Kill the shell running the while loop.

The parent process (i.e. the shell) should be shown in the ps output, e.g. with ps -ef, it's column 3.

There are no clues in the other processes listed with ps -auxefas to which is spawning the command. I'm looking at that 3rd column trying to figure out the link.

There are 5 bash shell processes but I don't know which is the one running the offending command. I can't just kill them all because one of them is running an important command.

I tried:

In one shell, "while true; do sleep 100000; done"

in another, "ps -ef":

kws 24642 24637 0 10:38 pts/3 00:00:00 -bash
root 25654 16727 0 11:57 ? 00:00:00 sshd: kws [priv]
kws 25658 25654 0 11:57 ? 00:00:00 sshd: kws@pts/4
kws 25665 25658 0 11:57 pts/4 00:00:00 -bash
kws 25711 24642 0 11:58 pts/3 00:00:00 sleep 100000
kws 25712 25665 0 11:58 pts/4 00:00:00 ps -ef

Killed 24642, the shell died and the sleep went away. If it still doesn't work for you try posting your "ps -ef".