Please Clean-Up Stray Processes on UNIX Machines!

 

Cleaning Processes:
I've been monitoring the JCC machines, and it seems that a lot of you
have many dangling processes sucking up system resources. Whenever you have
a parent that spaws multiple children and then exits, it is likely that the
child processes will still be running. It is imperitive that you kill
these processes! Here is what you have to type at the shell prompt:

	ps -ef | grep < login_name >

This will return a list of processes, similar to this:

	--- 18210     1  0   Feb 10 ?        0:00 a.out
	--- 18168     1  0   Feb 10 ?        0:00 a.out
	--- 19081     1  0 22:19:26 ?        0:00 a.out
	--- 29267 29263  0 19:57:34 pts/27   0:00 a.out 1.in 2.in
	--- 18614     1  0   Feb 10 ?        0:00 a.out

This listing shows the PID of the process on the left, and the PID of its
parent on the right. Any process who's parent dies is automatically picked
up by init(1), which always has a PID of 1 on any UNIX system.

Once you have this list, simply execute the following at the shell prompt:

	kill < offending_pid >

Continue issuing kill commands until you have removed all of the
offending processes. If some processes refuse to be killed, use the "-9",
instead.