[PLUG] Yum is immortal

[wes]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 9:32 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>wrote:

> This evening I was trying to install a program from source. Yeah, I
> should know better. But I have what appear to be superb detailed
> instructions. Except that the instructions are for Ubuntu so they are
> full of apt-get commands, but generally all I have to do is replace
> apt-get with yum.
>
> There was a command:
>
> sudo yum install qt4-dev-tools libqt4-opengl-dev libqtwebkit-dev
>
> It executed without error, but after 15 minutes I assumed it was hung,
> so I killed it with Ctrl-Z. Then I tried it again, but just the
> qt4-dev-tools. This gave me:
>

ctrl-z doesn't kill things. ctrl-c does.


> Existing lock /var/run/yum.pid: another copy is running as pid 20774.
> Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...
>   The other application is: yum
>
> So I tried 'sudo kill 20774' and the command executed without error,
> but yum is still running. I tried killing 20774 from sudo top, and
> again it executed without error, and still failed to kill yum.
>

the normal kill command by default, just asks the process to terminate
nicely. to kill something harder than the default, use kill -9. this tells
the process, "ok, you're done now." this may still leave you with issues
relating to the lock file, as yum won't have a chance to delete it before
ending. it'll depend on how yum handles an orphaned lock file.


> I can't do anything until I figure out how to drive a stake through
> yum's heart. Any suggestions?
>

have you considered rebooting?

-wes