On Thu, Mar 05, 2015 at 07:59:19AM -0800, Dan Youngquist wrote:
On 03/05/2015 07:27 AM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
On Thursday 05 March 2015 10:04:28 Baron wrote:
Having closed Iceweasel, it still seems to be
running
I have had this problem on and off in various versions over the years. I do:
# ps ax | grep iceweasel
# <response>
# kill xxxx
Faster/easier:
killall -9 iceweasel
Too fast, too easy. Have you actually tried it?
My prediction is that if you do, you will leave Iceweasel or Firefox
stuck in an unrunnable state. By using kill -9 you tell the operating
system to just yank the rug out from under Iceweasel, without giving it
a chance to clean up after itself. That means:
- anything that needs to be saved to disk won't be;
- the database may be left open, or worse, in an inconsistent state;
- lock files will be left in place.
I'm not willing to try it, but I'm pretty sure that if you do, when you
go to run Iceweasel/Firefox again, it will tell you that it is still
running. You need to find the two lock files, and delete them both.
Worse, you may have screwed up the database, which could leave Iceweasel
unable to track history, or destroy your bookmarks.
kill -9 is the equivalent of pulling the power cord. Use it only when
everything else fails. Everything else in this case should be:
- try kill <processid> first;
- give it 30 seconds or so, and if it still hasn't closed, try
kill -HUP <processid>
- if and only if that too fails, then and only then consider kill -9.
Oh, and I dislike killall, since that risks killing too many processes.
If you have something else running with iceweasel in the name, you'll
accidently kill that as well. That's just my personal preference though.
--
Steve