07-08-2003
Runaway process. Opinions needed
not too long ago, i wrote a very short script that will bring up 4 customized xterms. The script went completely abnormal simply because of an error I had made in a while loop. This script took control of the system and rendered everything useless. The system admin team which i was part of tried every command we could think of to kill this damn script but nothing worked. We tried fuser -k, pkill etc. Fuser -k could have worked but this script had spawn way too many pids for fuser to handle. As fuser was killing them, hundreds more were being born. the output from the uptime command was mind blowing (over 240)
now, from reading countless numbers of books, i knew there was a way I could have killed the person who started this script, which was me but I couldn't remember what command it was. To make a long story short, we had to reboot the server inorder for it to work properly
My question is, could there have been any other way we could have killed this process besides having to reboot it? I hate to fall in this same status quo again.
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script(1) User Commands script(1)
NAME
script - make record of a terminal session
SYNOPSIS
script [-a] [filename]
DESCRIPTION
The script utility makes a record of everything printed on your screen. The record is written to filename. If no file name is given, the
record is saved in the file typescript. See WARNINGS.
The script command forks and creates a sub-shell, according to the value of $SHELL, and records the text from this session. The script ends
when the forked shell exits or when Control-d is typed.
OPTIONS
The following option is supported:
-a Appends the session record to filename, rather than overwriting it.
NOTES
script places everything that appears on the screen in filename, including prompts.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|Availability |SUNWcsu |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|CSI |Enabled |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
SEE ALSO
attributes(5)
WARNINGS
script can pose a security risk when used in directories that are writable by other users (for example, /tmp), especially when run by a
privileged user, that is, root. Be sure that typescript is not a link before running script.
SunOS 5.10 30 Jan 2004 script(1)