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authorAlan Hicks <alan@lizella.net>2010-05-01 16:56:46 -0400
committerAlan Hicks <alan@lizella.net>2010-05-01 16:56:46 -0400
commitf39a880f399c38c71fe3d899b437813d9c1eafb7 (patch)
treeb760c744e9cee68227b28e6b92774f4c9fc55a91 /chapter_06.xml
parent58b6f588310f5361b43548f76c7ffff041d26b79 (diff)
downloadslackbook-f39a880f399c38c71fe3d899b437813d9c1eafb7.tar.xz
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@@ -138,12 +138,103 @@ are a variety of other signals that can be sent, but the three most
common are SIGTERM, SIGHUP, and SIGKILL.
</para>
+<para>
+What a process does when it receives a signal varies. Most programs
+will terminate (or attempt to terminate) whenever they receive any
+signal, but there are a few important differences. For starters, the
+SIGTERM signal informs the process that it should terminate itself at
+its earliest convenience. This gives the process time to finish up any
+important activities, such as writing information to the disk, before
+it closes. In contrast, the SIGKILL signal tells the process to
+terminate itself immediately, no questions asked. This is most useful
+for killing processes that are not responding and is sometimes called
+the "silver bullet". Some processes (particularly daemons) capture the
+SIGHUP signal and reload their configuration files whenever they
+receive it.
+</para>
+
+<para>
+In order to signal a process, we first need to know it's PID. You can
+get this easily with <application>ps</application> as we discused. In
+order to send different signals to a running process, you simply pass
+the signal number and <arg>-s</arg> as an argument. The <arg>-l</arg>
+argument lists all the signals you can chose and their number. You can
+also send signals by their name with <arg>-s</arg>.
+</para>
+
+<screen><prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>kill -l</userinput>
+ 1) SIGHUP 2) SIGINT 3) SIGQUIT 4) SIGILL
+ 5) SIGTRAP 6) SIGABRT 7) SIGBUS 8) SIGFPE
+ 9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR1 11) SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2
+13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM 16) SIGSTKFLT
+... many more lines ommitted ...
+<prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>kill 1234 # SIGTERM</userinput>
+<prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>kill -s 9 1234 # SIGKILL</userinput>
+<prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>kill -s 1 1234 # SIGHUP</userinput>
+<prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>kill -s HUP 1234 # SIGHUP</userinput>
+</screen>
+
+<para>
+Sometimes you may wish to terminate all running processes with a
+certain name. You can kill processes by name with
+<application>killall</application>(1). Just pass the same arguments to
+<application>killall</application> that you would pass to
+<application>kill</application>.
+</para>
+
+<screen><prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>killall bash # SIGTERM</userinput>
+<prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>killall -s 9 bash # SIGKILL</userinput>
+<prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>killall -s 1 bash # SIGHUP</userinput>
+<prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>killall -s HUP bash # SIGHUP</userinput>
+</screen>
+
</section>
<section>
<title>top</title>
<para>
+So far we've learned how to look at the active processes for a moment
+in time, but what if we want to monitor them for an extended period?
+<application>top</application>(1) allows us to do just that. It
+displays an ordered list of the processes on your system, along with
+vital information about them, and updates periodically. By default,
+processes are ordered by their CPU percentage and updates occur every
+three seconds.
+</para>
+
+<screen><prompt>darkstar:~$ </prompt><userinput>top</userinput>
+top - 16:44:15 up 26 days, 5:53, 5 users, load average: 0.08, 0.03, 0.03
+Tasks: 122 total, 1 running, 119 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie
+Cpu(s): 3.4%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 95.5%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
+Mem: 3058360k total, 2853780k used, 204580k free, 154956k buffers
+Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 2082652k cached
+
+ PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
+ 1 root 20 0 3928 632 544 S 0 0.0 0:00.99 init
+ 2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
+ 3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.82 migration/0
+ 4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0
+ 7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:11.22 events/0
+ 9 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.19 work_on_cpu/0
+ 11 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 khelper
+ 102 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:02.04 kblockd/0
+ 105 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 1:20.08 kacpid
+ 106 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.92 kacpi_notify
+ 175 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0
+ 177 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_aux
+ 178 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksuspend_usbd
+ 184 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 khubd
+ 187 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
+ 242 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:03.37 pdflush
+ 243 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:02.65 kswapd0
+</screen>
+
+<para>
+The man page has helpful details on how to interact with
+<application>top</application> such as changing its delay interval, the
+order processes are displayed, and even how to terminate processes
+right from within <application>top</application> itself.
</para>
</section>