Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!haven!adm!xadmx!Thomas_McFadden.Henr801M@xerox.com
From: Thomas_McFadden.Henr801M@xerox.com
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: when does kill -9 pid not work?
Message-ID: <20532@adm.BRL.MIL>
Date: 7 Aug 89 21:33:20 GMT
Sender: news@adm.BRL.MIL
Lines: 13

Marty,

Using kill -9 does not work when a process is waiting on i/o to complete or
when the priority of the process is set by the kernel to be less than PZERO
found in <sys/param.h>. Your process may have caused this if it was doing
alot of i/o and the kill program never got a chance to post the signal to
the run away process. Otherwise, the kernel may have increased the priority
of your process and gone to sleep waiting for some event (i.e. i/o) to
complete. The kernel does this so that another process doesn't come along,
use the same process memory space or other shared resource, and get
trashed.

Tom