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From: ranjit@grad2.cis.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Suggestions for a kill command
Message-ID: <15530@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 14 Oct 89 19:45:15 GMT
References: <1661@nigel.udel.EDU>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: ranjit@grad2.cis.upenn.edu.UUCP (Ranjit Bhatnagar)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 28

Since it is pretty much settled that it would be impractical
to add a true 'kill' to the Amiga OS, because of the difficulty
of tracking and freeing resources, how about a 'suspend' which
simply prevents a process from using any cpu time.  Much of
the time, what I want a 'kill' for is to get rid of a program which
is stuck in a loop and chewing up CPU time.  There should also
be a 'resume' method to bring the process back to life.  

Note that this is not quite the same as lowering the priority
of a process, since even at minimum priority, a process will 
continue to eat time on an otherwise idle system.  OK, you say,
if the system is otherwise idle, why do you care if the runaway
process is eating time?  Well, I may suspect that it's about to
do something dreadful (oh no, I forgot to put an upper limit
on the clear-memory loop) and I want it to STOP.

The psychological advantage of the terms 'suspend' and 'resume'
is that the user will not expect resources to be freed, and will
not complain when they aren't.  

Of course, if you're not careful, you'll end up with csh job
control...

	- ranjit


"Trespassers w"   ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu	mailrus!eecae!netnews!eniac!...
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