[TriLUG] Can't kill driftnet

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 22:45 -0500, Ivan Panarusky wrote:

> For some reason, I can't stop the program dritnet. I tried $sudo
killall driftnet, #killall driftnet, and even the system monitor. (it
crashed when I tied to kill it

> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:42 PM, Paul G. Szabady <paul at thyservice.com>wrote:
> 
> > How about killing the process id?
> >
> > $ ps auwx | grep driftnet | cut -d" " -f3
> >
> > Then kill the process id that's returned.  ie:
> >
> > $ kill -15 1234
> > or
> > $ kill -9 1234

> That did the trick, but why didn't anything else work?

When you originally did 'kill driftnet' the 'TERM' signal was sent.
Sometimes programs can't receive this signal and act upon this signal
due to their status so they just sit there trying to do something like
receive data from a network or read from a device thats gone missing.

Manually specifying a harsher signal like -9 will kill most things.  If
you can't kill it with 9, you have to kill things around it and hope
something lets go, and otherwise reboot.

Occasionally I find that GNOME's nautilus goes all wanky on me if I work
with a lot of photos or similar conditions where it likes to eat up
memory.  A quick shell and 'kill -1 nautilus' reboots it and frees up
all that lost memory.

man kill
man -S 7 signal

hth.
-- 
Maxwell Spangler
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA