[telemachos]

Instead of kill -9 (a nuke), you can often get results with just kill, kill -INT or kill -HUP. (The advantage is that the "weaker" signals allow your runaway program to do some cleanup, but kill -9 doesn't.)

There's a nice write-up and a function automating attempts to run increasingly strong signals on this site: http://web.archive.org/web/20080610070315/http://sial.org/ho...

(Thank god for the wayback machine. That site was full of good Unix tips and tutorials, but it's gone now.)

[DaveChild]

It's still there, just without a domain:

http://72.14.189.113/

[telemachos]

Thanks for letting me know. It's still probably easier to use the Wayback Machine since all of the site's internal links point to http://sial.org/ so browsing within the site is very painful. Still, I'm glad to see the content is all still online. I may just mirror the whole thing (there's tons of good reference material in there, especially for Perl, but also for Unix generally).