On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 19:47:19 +0000, Andy Green wrote: > Mike - EMAIL IGNORED wrote: >> On FC4 with KDE, I ran ps -ef and noticed that there >> were many old /usr/bin/tail processes. They all >> looked like tail -f that I had run. I wrote >> a script to kill -9 them. I ran tests and found >> that if I exit tail -f with ctrl-c the processes >> disappears, but if I close a KDE window on a >> tail -f without ctrl.c, the processes persists. >> >> Is this the way it should be? > > I believe so... if the tail did not subsequently try to show any more > output. Only when it tries to issue more output to the now gone-away > terminal session would it get a signal that would end up killing it. > > -Andy PROBLEM SOLVED but there may be another. I have confirmed Andy's description. The reason that I had many persistent tail processes is that I run swatch with the --tail-file option. When I kill a swatch process, it leaves a tail processes behind, but the tail process no longer receives input. (I discovered this the hard way -- a day after killing all my tails, I found that my swatch was no longer reporting.) The new problem: what to do (automatically) to eliminate the tail when I kill a swatch? Thanks, Mike.
