Q: A program has locked up and my machine is frozen, what do I do?

A: First, never turn off a UNIX workstation.

If a program locks up your workstation, you can kill that program from another computer. To kill a process remotely do the following.

1. Logon to another workstation.

2. In an X-term window type: 

telnet geogxx
where xx is the machine number of the locked computer.

3. Logon to the locked machine with your username and password.

4. Type the command: 

top
This command will bring up a screen listing all of the processes running on that workstation. Find the name of the program that is locked on the far right column and then note the corresponding PID (process ID).

5. To kill a process type 

k xxxxx
where xxxxx is the PID. This command will be entered in the upper portion of the top screen. When k is typed, ill will automatically appear to form the kill command. See example below.

Please Note: You can only kill processes that belong to you. 

last pid: 27727;  load averages:  0.13,  0.09,  0.09
11:30:02
60 processes:  59 sleeping, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 66.4% idle, 14.8% user, 18.8% kernel,  0.0% iowait,  0.0% swap
Memory: 192M real, 18M free, 8984K swap in use, 61M swap free
###TYPE WILL APPEAR HERE####
  PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE   TIME    CPU COMMAND
27717 quinlan    1  -6    0 2004K 1552K cpu     0:07  2.41% top
24322 root       1  34    0   10M 6612K sleep   3:01  2.17% Xsun
27720 root       1   3    0  884K  648K sleep   0:00  0.68% sh
27029 quinlan    1  33    0 5104K 4164K sleep   0:06  0.52% xterm
26929 quinlan    1  33    0 2692K 1924K sleep   0:17  0.28% fvwm2
27727 root       1   6    0  788K  512K sleep   0:00  0.24% sleep
27721 root       1   6    0  280K  276K sleep   0:00  0.23% config_update
27182 quinlan    1  33    0 4288K 3356K sleep   0:03  0.15% xterm
  489 root      12  33    0 2332K 1856K sleep 109:06  0.12% mibiisa
  381 root       1  33    0  876K  568K sleep   1:11  0.07% utmpd
    1 root       1  33    0  664K  108K sleep   9:17  0.05% init
27185 quinlan    1  33    0 2056K 1376K sleep   0:00  0.03% telnet
  464 root       1 -25    0 2384K 1328K sleep 149:08  0.00% niceguy
  276 root       1  33    0 3496K 2472K sleep  15:11  0.00% amd
  207 root       1  34  -12 2184K  756K sleep   9:05  0.00% xntpd
  178 root       1  33    0 2940K 1488K sleep   8:05  0.00% named
26978 quinlan    1  34    0   27M   17M sleep   7:01  0.00% netscape
  200 root      26  33    0 4752K 1684K sleep   4:43  0.00% syslogd
  336 root       1  23    0 1532K  876K sleep   2:47  0.00% cron
  438 root       1  23    0 1960K 1192K sleep   1:52  0.00% snmpdx
  664 root       1  34    0 1404K  820K sleep   0:29  0.00% imapstats
  329 root       1  33    0 1864K  844K sleep   0:25  0.00% sshd1
 1057 nobody     6  33    0 2284K 1120K sleep   0:17  0.00% identd
  373 root       1  33    0 2076K 1232K sleep   0:12  0.00% sendmail
26965 quinlan    1  25    0 5204K 3056K sleep   0:10  0.00% pine-4.21