Donald, On Tuesday 20 March 2007 09:58, Donald D Henson wrote: > I seem to have gotten myself into a situation where a Firefox process > will not die nor will it display anything. (The problem seems to have > something to do with You Tube.)
By which you mean it has something to do with the Flash plug-in, which YouTube uses to display all its video (that's there "innovation"). > When I try to start up another > instance of Firefox, I get an error message that tells me to either > close the current process or to reboot the system. Rebooting is not a > good solution. I remember from the 'old days' that there is a cli > command to identify a process id and another one to kill a process. > I've searched my memory and the User Manual but cannot identify those > two commands. Any assistance will be sincerely appreciated. The command "pidof" tells the process IDs for all running instances of a given executable. (You should know that Firefox's executable binary is called "firefox-bin", not "firefox".) The command "ps" lists running processes. By default, it lists only those started by you and associated with the same terminal from which the ps command was issued. If you add the "-a" option, it will show all of your processes that are associated with some tty (which still excludes most GUI processes). Using "ps -u yourLoginNameOrUserID" will show all of your processes without regard to controlling tty. Using "ps -ax" will show all processes running on the system, regardless of who started them or whether they have a controlling tty. Kill is the command that sends signals to processes. The default signal sent by kill, SIGTERM, or 15, is a polite request for a process to shut down. It gets to perform whatever clean-up processing it requires. By the same token, the process can ignore such a request. The unignorable kill signal (SIGKILL or 9) cannot be intercepted by the process in order to perform clean-up operations (or to refuse to die), so it will kill the process if at all possible. It's never preferable to use SIGKILL, at least not before trying SIGTERM. Kill exists as a shell built-in, so you can use "help kill" to get usage information. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
