How do I kill a program that won't die??

[p310don]

I have a PC that is connected to my TV that I watch programs on. The programs are on a remote server.

It has been working fine for a long time, but as of yesterday my network seemed to hit a glitch, and in the process, the media players (both SMplayer and VLC) have hung.

I killed SMplayer but it will not restart. VLC will not kill from the notification area.

Both are still showing up as having phantom entries in HTOP and killing them from there does nothing. I also cannot unmount the network share as it says it is busy.

I want to know if there is a way to kill these phantom processes without restarting the PC. I am going for a record, so far I'm up to 260 days uptime, and it'd be a shame to restart now...

The PC is running Tahr 6.05

[peterw]

If you know what programme causes the problem then the kill command will work.
However, I have found "Ctrl + Alt +backspace" resets the Window and the programmes dependent on it (I think) and that may achieve your desire.

[p310don]

If you know what programme causes the problem then the kill command will work.
However, I have found "Ctrl + Alt +backspace" resets the Window and the programmes dependent on it (I think) and that may achieve your desire.

Yep, that normally works. But isn't working this time for some reason.

[puppytahruser]

You can try from task manager right click on process and select kill with following 'yes'. If it does not kill the process see the ppid i.e. parents pid, if you cant kill parent pid then unfortunately you may not kill the process. In worst case may be you cant even shutdown or restart, may need hard shutdown(pressing power button long).

[bigpup]

You have gotten to the time when the only good fix is: complete power off.
Wait 1 minute.
Power on boot up.

Looks to me like you have corrupted memory that is not going to completely let go of whatever it is causing this. It is probably more than one thing.
Just need to force a complete memory dump and clean, by doing a complete power off.

Why do you think they put the reset button on computers? They wanted an easy way to do the above.

You have probably been very lucky it took this long to happen.
Do not overlook you could have a piece of hardware going bad.

[mostly_lurking]

None of these work?

Code: Select all

kill -9 <process id>

killall -9 <process name>

pkill -9 <process name>

https://ss64.com/bash/kill.html

[musher0]

Hello, p310don.

Try typing in console

Code: Select all

kill -s 9 `pgrep vlc`

or

Code: Select all

kill -s 15 `pgrep vlc`

.
You can also do it with htop. Please see attached illustration.

Launch htop
highlight the program that's playing turkey with the down or up arrow
when you found it, hit F9
a column with all sorts of "kill" appear on the left-hand side of the htop window
It starts with # 15 highlighted.
Hit return to kill the program.

Recheck. If the turkey is still alive , try repeating the above procedure with # 9
in the left column of htop.

Important Warning:
do not use any other number than 9 or 15 in that left column of htop.

Merry Christmas, BTW.

IHTH.

[Gordie]

ctrl +alt +esc

[Flash]

I once accidentally opened several instances of a media player, I forget which one, and wound up with a bunch of zombies that showed in Pprocess but couldn't be killed no matter what I tried. I finally had to reboot to get rid of them. There is a thread about that in the forum somewhere and I think it has a possible solution but I rebooted before I saw it.

[mfb]

Flash,

Here is an excellent killer from a well known Forum member

[Flash]

Thank you! That could be the solution I didn't try.

[p310don]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Not a single one worked, which is a bugger - so I've gone the reboot option.

262 days, 16 hrs uptime all gone... almost

The problem is network related. Tahr's shutdown process includes "unmounting stray filesystems" - it is stuck on not unmounting the server share, which is the cause of the problem it seems... Hard reset coming soon..