I started cvs to update the mozilla source tree when cvs hanged. I tried to kill the process by using kill and kill -9 but that failed. I also tried to kill the parent bash shell and that worked but the cvs process was still there.

I have tried all I know to kill the process including kill, kill -9 and killall -9 cvs. Any help is appreciated.

Have you tried Ctrl-C

Of course I have Thats the first thing I did. ctrl-c ctrl-z and so on. After that failed I started using kill.

try the button on the pc named reset :look:

You have an orphaned zombie process. You could try silver bullets on it, but failing that the only way is a good old fashioned reboot :-(

How annoying Reminds me of good old fashioned win98 where you had to reboot every day.

Very true...and besides that "Rebooting is a sign of weakness"....but sometimes it has to be done. Sad but true.

In future though, it might be worth doing this...

Gradually increase the strength of your kill signals rather than going in there with the sledge hammer straight away i.e. go for kill, -3, -1, -11 (beware this will often produce a core dump), -5 and then if all that fails go for the -9. You should make sure the process is given an adequate amount of time to exit and clear up after itself before wading in with the old -9 though.

It is actually a nice idea to write a bit of a wrapper script to an alias kill to it instead of using /usr/bin/kill just to automate the process a bit. Something like this might do the trick...

#!/bin/bash

if [ $1 = "-9" ]
then
echo "Kill signal of -9 is not acceptable. Overriding."
shift
fi

for PID in $*
do
PROCESS=`ps -fp$PID | grep -v STIME`
USERID=`echo $PROCESS | awk '{print $1}'`
PROCNAME=`echo $PROCESS | awk '{print $8}'`

LIVE=`ps -fp$PID | grep -c -v STIME`
if [ $LIVE -gt 0 ]
then
echo "Killing process $PID $PROCNAME for $USERID with default signal."
/bin/kill -15 $PID
sleep 2
LIVE=0
fi
LIVE=`ps -fp$PID | grep -c -v STIME`
if [ $LIVE -gt 0 ]
then
echo "Process still alive. Upping kill signal to -3"
/bin/kill -3 $PID
sleep 2
LIVE=0
fi
LIVE=`ps -fp$PID | grep -c -v STIME`
if [ $LIVE -gt "0" ]
then
echo "Process still alive. Upping kill signal to -1"
/bin/kill -1 $PID
sleep 2
LIVE=0
fi
LIVE=`ps -fp$PID | grep -c -v STIME`
if [ $LIVE -gt "0" ]
then
echo "Process still alive. Upping kill signal to -11"
/bin/kill -11 $PID
sleep 2
LIVE=0
fi
LIVE=`ps -fp$PID | grep -c -v STIME`
if [ $LIVE -gt "0" ]
then
echo "Process still alive. Upping kill signal to -5"
/bin/kill -5 $PID
sleep 2
LIVE=0
fi
LIVE=`ps -fp$PID | grep -c -v STIME`
if [ $LIVE -gt "0" ]
then
echo "Unable to kill process."
LIVE=0
fi
echo ""
done