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I can not kill one process with command kill -9, is there any way to kill it without restarting the machine?

chicks
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zjffdu
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    What do you mean kill -9 doesn't kill the process? What command are you issuing and what is the output returned? Maybe you mistyped the PID and you are killing off random processes wreaking havoc on the system. – Red Cricket May 16 '16 at 03:55
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    That process is probably `defunct` and when that happens, you often do need to restart the machine to solve it. You should find out what happened to it though as it's fairly unusual that it would get stuck like that. It may **possibly** indicate a hardware or driver issue. – Julie Pelletier May 16 '16 at 04:24
  • This seems to happen to me when a process is stuck in a syscall. Rebooting takes care of it. – chicks May 16 '16 at 23:31

3 Answers3

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If the process is in [defunct] state possible reason could be that it waits one of his child processes to complete. If this is handwrited script try to observe what child processes he calls and check if there are some hanging.

Alex Taran
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If a process is not terminated after a kill -9 the reason is that it is stuck in an uninterruptible sleep in kernel code. This is mostly related to I/O problems. Either the sleep ends (I/O ends or fails or times out, etc.) and then the process will be cleaned up, or you'll have to reboot the machine.

Martin C.
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If you send signal number 9 (sigKILL) to right PID and process will not end, there is only one possible solution. Restart machine.

Common mistake is sending sigKILL to wrong proces number PID, so check it twicely before hit enter.

Michal Petrilak
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