[PLUG] Top questions

[Joe Pruett]

On 05/12/2012 06:49 PM, Russell Senior wrote:
>>>>>> "John" == John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> writes:
> John> 1) I can't read the list of running processes easily. I see the
> John> application I want to kill, but just as I am about to read its
> John> PID, the screen jumps. How do I make the list of running
> John> processes sit still?
>
> Two more that I didn't see mentioned are:
>
>  a) pidof rhythmbox
>
>     which should return a list (zero or more) of the pid's of process
>     named by the argument; and 
>
>  b) pstree -p 
>
>     which lists a nice tree of processes running with parent/child
>     links.  The -p option lists the pid's as well.  You can do
>     something quite similar with /bin/ps, but I never remember the
>     options; pstree is easier to remember.
>
> As for it not dying, i'm not sure.  You could try "strace -p PID",
> which should tell you what system calls it is making.  It might not be
> making any, which would tell you something (ctrl-c to exit strace).
>
>
a process that is "unkillable" is stuck in the kernel usually because of
some i/o problem.  strace won't work because the process is already in
kernel mode.  given that it was a music program, i'd guess that
something in the audio drivers has a bug that got tripped over and was
stuck waiting for something to happen with no timeout.