[PLUG] Top questions

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 12 May 2012 17:25:45 -0500
Fred James <fredjame at fredjame.cnc.net> dijo:

>John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> 1) I can't read the list of running processes easily. I see the
>> application I want to kill, but just as I am about to read its PID,
>> the screen jumps. How do I make the list of running processes sit
>> still? 
>>
>> 2) At the moment I have Rhythmbox running on my Lucid desktop and I
>> can't kill it. It does not appear in the list of running processes in
>> top. Gnome System Monitor does list it, with a PID of 24384, shown as
>> "uninterruptible." In Gnome System Monitor I right click on it and
>> select "kill process," but it doesn't die. 
>>
>> >From the command line I did "sudo kill -9 24384" and it took the
>> command without error, but Rhythmbox remains alive and well.
>>
>> I know I can kill it if I restart the computer, but I shouldn't have
>> to do that. So far I'm firing blanks. Any suggestions?
>>   
>John Jason Jordan
>1) Top ... top -n 1 ... will do one iteration and stop
>2) "uninterruptible" ... maybe that means just that?
>3) ps is a possibility?  ps -ef | grep -i Rythmbox | grep -v grep
>3.1) the -i is for ignore case
>3.2) the -v is to ignore the next pattern (in this case grep) ... that 
>last part is optional, of course
>3.3) ps list both PID and PPID ... possibly if PID is not "killable", 
>the PPID is?  But be careful ... identify the PPID process before 
>jumping off the cliff, OK?
>
>example:
>    ps -ef | grep -i Rythmbox | grep -v grep
>if this tells you that Rythmbox is running as 24384, and the parent is
>3001
>    ps -ef | grep 3001 | grep -v grep
>should help you identify the PPID process
>
>Does any of that help?
>
>Question ... is there a GUI presence on your desktop representing 
>Rythmbox?  If so can it not be closed from there?
>Question ... if you ps for Rythmbox, who is the owner? is it running, 
>sleeping, or zombie? under top, how much cpu and memory is it using?

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions, especially the suggestions for
making top sit still. That will be helpful in the future.

As for Rhythmbox, none of the suggestions helped kill it. The ps
commands listed it, but no parent process or any other process
associated with it. I finally decided I was tired of learning Linux and
it was time to get my tunes running again, so I rebooted. Lucid
prompted me that Rhythmbox was still running, but I told it to go ahead
and shut down anyway. Then Lucid hung on shutdown and I had to hit the
power button. 

I don't know what kind of code is in Rhythmbox, but it's evil. I've
used it for years without much problem, until now. But I've never been
fond of the interface, so I think I'll shop for alternatives.