My question is a bit theoretical.
Lets say I have a process with PID 10, in order to terminate it I can use both exit and kill.
exit command bring the process to Zombie state and later the process is beeing removed thru the release_task() func.
But what happens when kill is called on a process ? Does kill call exit ? Do the process become zombie?
I really dont understand how killworks behind the scenes and which kernel function do the job
If it changes anything - im working (actually studying) on a v2.4.18 machine
Thank you very much
Related
I'm trying to monitor multiple instances of the same process. I can't for the life of me do this without running into a problem.
All the examples I have seen so far on the internet involve me writing out the PID or monitoring the process itself. The issue is that if one instance fails, it doesn't mean all the rest have failed as well.
In order for me to write out the PID for each process it would mean I'd probably have to run each process with a short delay to record the correct, seeing as the way I need to record the PID is done through the process name being probed.
If I'm wrong on this, please correct me. But so far I haven't found a way to monitor each individual process, which all have the same name.
To add to the above, the processes are run in a batch script and each one is run in its own screen (ffmpeg would otherwise not be able to run in the background).
If anyone can point me vaguely in the right direction on how to do this in Linux I would really appreciate it. I read somewhere that it would be possible to set up symlinks which would then give me fake process names and that way I can monitor the 'fake' process name.
man wait. For example, in shell script:
wget "$url1" &
pid1=$!
wget "$url2" &
pid2=$!
wait $pid1 $pid2
will launch both wget processes, and wait until both processes are finished (or failed)
How do i know, if a process has completed its execution without any errors?
How do i know, if a C++ program has returned success to OS?
If i run it via shell, then i could use $?, however if i am checking the status of a process, initiated by other user, how could i check the status?
Say i started a process in morning, and it got terminated at noon. i have been workign on some other activities till evening, and prior leaving, i would like to check what the processes has returned to OS. how could i acheve that, programatically. Running through syslog would help, but looking for alternatives.
i could run through the OS's process table and read this information, however it sounds a bit complicated for my requirement. Do we have something like syslog, where all errors of processes are recorded?
Any other ways to retrieve errors reported by terminated processes (of other users too)?
When a process terminates its parent process must acknowledge this using the wait or waitpid function. These functions also return the exit status. After the call to wait or waitpid the process table entry is removed, and the exit status is no longer stored anywhere in the operating system. You should check if the software you use to start the process saves the exit status somewhere.
If the parent process has not acknowledged that the child has terminated you can read its exit status from the /proc file system: it is the last field in /proc/[pid]/stat. It is stored in the same format that wait returns it, so you have to divide by 256 to get the exit code. Also you probably have to be root.
I am facing problem with shell script i have ascript which will be running in infinite loop so say its havin PID X.The process is running for 4-5 hours but automatically the process getting killed.This is happening only for some long time running system and i am observing some times after 2 hours also its getting killed.
I am not able to find the reason the why its going down why its getting killed.No one is using the system other than me.And i am running the process as a root user.
Can any one explain or suspect the reason who is killing the process.
Below is the sample script
#!/bin/bash
until ./test.tcl; do
echo "Server 'test.tcl' crashed with exit code $?. Respawing.." >&2
done
In test.tcl script i am running it for infinite loop and the script is used to trap signal and do some special operation.But we find that test.tcl is also going down.
So is there any way from where i capture who and how it gets killed.
Enable core dump in your system, it is the most commonly used method for app crash analysis. I know it is a bit painful to gdb core file, but more or less you can find something out of it.
Here is a reference link for you.(http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-core-dumps.html).
Another way to do this is tracing you script by "strace -p PID-X", note that it will slow down your system, espeically several hours in your case, but it can be the last resort.
Hope above helpful to you.
Better to check all the signals generated and caught by OS at that time by specific script might be one of signal is causing to kill your process.
Ok, I need to write a code that calls a script, and if the operation in script hangs, terminates the process.
The preferred language is Python, but I'm also looking through C and bash script documentation too.
Seems like an easy problem, but I can't decide on the best solution.
From research so far:
Python: Has some weird threading model where the virtual machine uses
one thread at a time, won't work?
C: The preferred solution so far seems to use SIGALARM + fork +
execl. But SIGALARM is not heap safe, so it can trash everything?
Bash: timeout program? Not standard on all distros?
Since I'm a newbie to Linux, I'm probably unaware of 500 different gotchas with those functions, so can anyone tell me what's the safest and cleanest way?
Avoid SIGALRM because there is not much safe stuff to do inside the signal handler.
Considering the system calls that you should use, in C, after doing the fork-exec to start the subprocess, you can periodically call waitpid(2) with the WNOHANG option to inspect whether the subprocess is still running. If waitpid returns 0 (process is still running) and the desired timeout has passed, you can kill(2) the subprocess.
In bash you can do something similar to this:
start the script/program in background with &
get the process id of the background process
sleep for some time
and then kill the process (if it is finished you cannot kill it) or you can check if the process is still live and then to kill it.
Example:
sh long_time_script.sh &
pid=$!
sleep 30s
kill $pid
you can even try to use trap 'script_stopped $pid' SIGCHLD - see the bash man for more info.
UPDATE: I found other command timeout. It does exactly what you need - runs a command with a time limit. Example:
timeout 10s sleep 15s
will kill the sleep after 10 seconds.
There is a collection of Python code that has features to do exactly this, and without too much difficulty if you know the APIs.
The Pycopia collection has the scheduler module for timing out functions, and the proctools module for spawning subprocesses and sending signals to it. The kill method can be used in this case.
I can't find a good way to find out when a process exits in Linux. Does anyone have a solution for that?
One that I can think of is check process list periodically, but that is not instant and pretty expensive (have to loop over all processes each time).
Is there an interface for doing that on Linux? Something like waitpid, except something that can be used from unrelated processes?
Thanks,
Boda Cydo
You cannot wait for an unrelated process, just children.
A simpler polling method than checking the process list, if you have permission, you can use the kill(2) system call and "send" signal 0.
From the kill(2) man page:
If sig is 0, then no signal is sent,
but error checking is still performed;
this can be used to check for the
existence of a process ID or process
group ID
Perhaps you can start the program together with another program, the second one doing whatever it is you want to do when the first program stops, like sending a notification etc.
Consider this very simple example:
sleep 10; echo "finished"
sleep 10 is the first process, echo "finished" the second one (Though echo is usually a shell plugin, but I hope you get the point)
Another option is to have the process open an IPC object such as a unix domain socket; your watchdog process can detect when the process quits as it will immediately be closed.
If you know the PID of the process in question, you can check if /proc/$PID exists. That's a relatively cheap stat() call.