07-08-2003
RTM, this sounds like a "while(1) fork();" situation. Every single process is trying to make more copies of itself.
You can su to the user in question. Then you can do: "kill -9 -1" which will kill every process owned by that user. That is the trick that I think you are looking for.
But: "kill -STOP -1" is more subtle. All of the user's processes will suddenly stop running. Then you can "kill -9" the bad guys. After the bad guys are gone, you can "kill -CONT" any good processes that you don't want to lose.
If your shell does not have kill as a built-in, there is a problem... you probably can't start another process to run the kill command. If that happens, use: "exec /usr/bin/kill -9 -1" or whatever.
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kill(1) General Commands Manual kill(1)
Name
kill - send a signal to a process
Syntax
kill [-sig] processid...
kill -l
Description
The command sends the TERM (terminate, 15) signal to the specified processes. If a signal name or number preceded by `-' is given as first
argument, that signal is sent instead of terminate. For further information, see
The terminate signal kills processes that do not catch the signal; `kill -9 ...' is a sure kill, as the KILL (9) signal cannot be caught.
By convention, if process number 0 is specified, all members in the process group (that is, processes resulting from the current login) are
signaled. This works only if you use and not if you use To kill a process it must either belong to you or you must be superuser.
The process number of an asynchronous process started with `&' is reported by the shell. Process numbers can also be found by using It
allows job specifiers ``%...'' so process ID's are not as often used as arguments. See for details.
Options
-l Lists signal names. The signal names are listed by `kill -l', and are as given in /usr/include/signal.h, stripped of the common SIG
prefix.
See Also
csh(1), ps(1), kill(2), sigvec(2)
kill(1)