Trying to kill a process that just won't die...

[Gregory Gulik <greg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, it's been a while since I ran into something like this but I have a 
process hung that I can't seem to kill.  It's a gtar process doing a 
backup of my personal files to a large drive I use as a backup device.

The process info:

root     11952     1  0 Jan17 ?        00:00:00 gtar 
--use-compress-program=/usr/local/admin/bin/gzip1 --totals -cvl 
--exclude core --exclude .thumbnail --exclude xover-cache --exclude cache

Files that are open:

[root@penguin root]# lsof -p 11952
COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE     SIZE   NODE NAME
gtar    11952 root  cwd    DIR  22,66     4096     65 /backup/greg
gtar    11952 root  rtd    DIR    3,2     4096      2 /
gtar    11952 root  txt    REG    3,2   153992 368163 /bin/tar
gtar    11952 root  mem    REG    3,2   107724 228281 /lib/ld-2.3.2.so
gtar    11952 root  mem    REG    3,2  1578228 416151 /lib/tls/libc-2.3.2.so
gtar    11952 root  mem    REG    3,2 33513072 468527 
/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
gtar    11952 root    0r  FIFO    0,5           39450 pipe
gtar    11952 root    1w   REG    3,2       82 224452 /var/log/nfs.list
gtar    11952 root    2w   REG    3,2       82 224452 /var/log/nfs.list

The script I use saves a list of archived files to /var/log/nfs.list 
(used to work over NFS, not backs up to local drive).

I've tried every signal I could think of to use with kill but the 
process just won't die.  It's not using any CPU but the load average has 
been over 1.0 since the process got hung (2 days ago).

All files are accessed on local drives, NFS should not be in the 
equation at all.

Any ideas????
...besides a reboot of course.


--
Greg Gulik                                 http://www.gulik.org/greg/
greg @ gulik.org