frozen ttys

[David Csercsics]

>just wondering the best solution for thawing a tty that's completely 
>frozen. in this particular case lynx was the app that froze but I've 
>seen it happen with epic and a few other progs. I try kill -9 the 
>process but nothing.

Well if you press control s by accident adn that causes things
to freeze then control q should restart that for you. The other
thing to check is the scroll lock could be on giving the illusion
that your tty is locked when really the problem is that no text is
scrolling. Another thing to do would be to kill the bash process
running in that console. Just grep for teh process ID of the bash in
the frozen tty adn then kill -9 it and that may fix it. If killing the
shell that is running the process fails to unlock it then kill -9 the
pid of the getty that is running on that console.  If all of the above
fails then doing shutdown now from another console will drop you into
single user mode and then you can telinit 2 or whatever your default
run level is. Single user mode will not fiddle with your uptime.