Get Out Of Jail Free!

[Janina Sajka]

This message is for Octavian and anyone else who has not yet
learned that you don't need to reboot Linux to solve a problem.

Here's what to do instead:

1.)	Become root in another console and kill the application
that is giving you trouble. In Octavian's example the application
is emacs, so here's the appropriate command for root to give in
another console:

killall emacs

2.)	If all else fails, kill the console session as root from
another console. get a listing of everything running in the
console where you got stuck. If that console is tty1, for
example, you would do:

ps -t tty1

This will print out a list of all the running processes in tty1.
Find the one that says "bash" on the right hand side of the line,
and note the process id, called pid, on the left. Then kill that
pid as follows:

kill -9 pid

where pid is the process id you identified for bash above.

There are more elegant ways to get out of trouble, but these two
will keep you learning and keep you from wasting time rebooting. 

To learn more about these things look at the man pages for
killall, kill, pidof, and ps.



-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org

   Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
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